[pempem]

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.

[reactordev]

It’s more aggressive than that. It’s an intentional dismantling of higher education overall.

[FrustratedMonky]

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.

[nradov]

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.

[idiotsecant]

They would claim that, and they would be wrong. As has been repeatedly and exhaustively demonstrated.

[teddy-smith]

Amen, trickle down economics is the worst meme ever created.

[rolandog]

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"...

[gjsman-1000]

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.

[smallmancontrov]

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.

[corimaith]

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.

[array_key_first]

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.

[corimaith]

>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".

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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

Nobody does this.

[the_sleaze_]

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.

[the_sleaze_]

This wasn't a response to any of his arguments.

I am interested in what people have to say about them though.

1. DEI and identity politics prioritization 2. cost

[bonsai_spool]

> 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.

[ceejayoz]

> That's not a great way to survive.

Wait until you see how well setting it all on fire works.

[gjsman-1000]

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.

[smallmancontrov]

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.

[rightbyte]

You seem to argue that academia of all places made having children being a chore. Not like, dunno, job security, housing and child care costs?

Whatever beef you got is what 'media' fed you selected smug academics to piss you off.

[bonsai_spool]

> 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

[someothherguyy]

I feel bad for the toxic world building you are committing yourself to. You should try not monolithizing groups of people.

[yongjik]

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."

[reactordev]

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.

[elevation]

Oddly, the actual threat to knowledge generation? Institutions that absorb societal-scale science budgets while perpetuating systemic fraud.

Institutional administrators confiscate 50, 60, 70% of every research grant.

Institutions demand published work even when results do not warrant it, and demote professors honest enough to document a null result.

The peer review system then rubber stamps papers with no actual review or reproduction. Journals blacklist professors who withhold endorsement.

The result? 90%+ of academic science is fraud. But which 90%? We need to drastically reform this system.

[monkeyelite]

This. It’s not useful to capture the smartest people if we deploy them to spend 50% of their time promoting projects for grants.

[searine]

This is anti-intellectual propaganda.

Seriously, 90%? None of what you said is happening at anywhere near that scale. Touch grass.

[monkeyelite]

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.

[eli_gottlieb]

No, it's not a scary thought that physicists and chemists don't care whether a Republican or Democrat is in office.

[monkeyelite]

It’s scary that:

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”.

[eli_gottlieb]

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.

[searine]

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.

[knappa]

> Institutional administrators confiscate 50, 60, 70% of every research grant.

Not even the Trump admin is alleging levels of indirect costs that high. See e.g.

https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-0...

"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.

[elevation]

> 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.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48540

> 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%.

[gammarator]

[citation needed]

[aprilthird2021]

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

[bonsai_spool]

> This all started when the govt began withholding federal funding in an attempt to clamp down on campus protests

This is definitely not why the 'govt began withholding federal funding'

[aprilthird2021]

I guess it's the excuse, maybe not the real reason. But the cases with UCLA and Harvard is when this all changed

[bonsai_spool]

> I guess it's the excuse, maybe not the real reason. But the cases with UCLA and Harvard is when this all changed

That is not true. Those happened in 2024.

The extortionate demands are happening in 2025.

The campus protests are clearly a pretext.

[yongjik]

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.

[kadushka]

I hope they're cutting their bloated administration departments before cutting classes and lecturers, but I'm not holding my breath.

[awesome_dude]

> bloated administration departments

Can you demonstrate how those administration departments were bloated (in any way)

edit: re-added "administration" which I had, for some reason, neglected to add, thinking that it was obvious that that was what I was talking about.

[kadushka]

Yes, this fact is well-known and has been widely discussed. The first two google search results provide the stats:

https://students.bowdoin.edu/bowdoin-review/features/death-b...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/admini...

[kenjackson]

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.

[araes]

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.

[awesome_dude]

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)

[awesome_dude]

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.

[sherburt3]

Feel free to do your own analysis

[layman51]

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

[awesome_dude]

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.

[kelipso]

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.

[aprilthird2021]

They are cutting both from what I hear from lecturers in top schools

[boplicity]

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.

[gbacon]

This seems like a broad overgeneralization unless you believe zero fat in grad schools is available for trimming.

[michaelt]

Most phd programmes are very, very low fat when it comes to salaries.

An academic CS department has to attract PhD level talent in hot areas like ML while only paying $30k a year.

[harvey9]

Is there a long term financial payoff, or does it mostly attract people who are choosing academia over commercial for some other reason?

[LPisGood]

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.

[aprilthird2021]

In CS there's a long term payoff bc tech has the money to invest in R&D even in an economy like this one

[array_key_first]

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).

[aprilthird2021]

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

[LPisGood]

The fat (insofar as it exists) is almost entirely not in mathematics PhD student funding.

Compared to almost any activity a university could take, it is incredibly cheap to bring in mathematics PhD students.

[dotnet00]

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.

[oscaracso]

>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.

[dotnet00]

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.

[thisisit]

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"

[colechristensen]

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.

[nxobject]

…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…

[LPisGood]

A lot of software licenses are free for academic use for what it’s worth.

[eli_gottlieb]

Matlab and Adobe sure aren't free!

[jltsiren]

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.

[kenjackson]

"You could cut university admin costs by 75% and lose nothing."

People say that, but could you really? I'd love to see a breakdown on how you pull this off.

[pyuser583]

It can be done - I went to a college that did it.

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.

[colechristensen]

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.

[kenjackson]

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.