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I am not a fan of the orange man. But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more effic

I am not a fan of the orange man. But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student. All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many at a tuition of 1/5th to 1/10th depending on in/out of state and community vs vs 4 year college. Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.

School-Cotton 2y ago
The feds aren’t funding ivies for the purpose of education, they’re funding researchers who happen to work at the ivies to do research.
- steveBK123 2y ago
  Multiple people pointing this out, and absolutely right. Some question though of how all the research grants do kind of cross-subsidize the education in a way as it pays for research professors, their graduate staff, etc? Otherwise why do we collocate research and teaching?
  - nine_k 2y ago
    > why do we collocate research and teaching? Because we want the same scientists who do, or recently did, advanced research to teach students? Because we want students to be involved in actual real genuine cutting-edge research? I suppose this is the logic. As a student back in the day I worked in a university lab, and it was pretty interesting to play a role in solving problems that don't have answers in the end of a textbook.
  - foobiekr 2y ago
    "Otherwise why do we collocate research and teaching?" Because you need a second generation of researchers.
  - jasonhong 2y ago
    This was recently discussed on Hacker News about two weeks ago. See this blog post by Steve Blank talking about the rise of research universities and why the USA is a science powerhouse. https://steveblank.com/2025/04/15/how-the-u-s-became-a-science-superpower/ https://steveblank.com/2025/04/15/how-the-u-s-became-a-scien... And the discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692360 Also, pragmatically, it's a system that has yielded incredible ROI since WW2, in terms of new industries, new companies, jobs, science, economic gains, productivity gains, and national security. The US university system is the envy of the entire world, and it's being targeted for dismantling by very petty, cruel, and incompetent people.
  - onepointsixC 2y ago
    We did so because having all laboratories be government run was inefficient so in WW2 we decided to split the costs with private and public universities who will maintain labs, equipment, and the federal government will pay directly for the research.
joshuanapoli 2y ago
So far, the funding in question is research grants. There's an argument that research is more effective at the universities that have concentrated the best researchers.
- mcmcmc 2y ago
  There’s also an argument that public funds should go to public schools.
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    Yes, complementing an observation that there are many funding sources that aren't the Federal Government From my conversations with people, this university funding topic is a mere proxy for their disdain with Trump on every topic, in a fairly incoherent rehash of random headlines. Have found very few people willing to discuss how universities are funded like this article is. The last 75 years of interacting with the federal government and proletariat will be a footnote in these school’s half millenium history. It won’t even be controversial. Non-upper class people won’t be using them to get into corporations, a mere happenstance of the last 75 years and not what these universities view themselves as. Non-upper class people won’t be worried about how many of them are in, and what criteria is involved, and how fair. And the Federal government won’t be using their one avenue of funding to bother them about it. 75 out of 400, and then 1,000 years. A footnote. Probably laughed about. “Remember when we had $50bn from daytrading tax free and got the US government to pay for our toys every year until a total populist uprising occurred at the expense of the entire nation. Other People’s Money! Rowing club later?”
  - op00to 2y ago
    What about private research institutes? They don’t really educate anyone, not in the way that people think of when they say education. Why must all funds only go to public organizations?
    - HDThoreaun 2y ago
      why should the government pay for that? If people want to do private research thats up to them
titanomachy 2y ago
Most of the money is research grants, not for training undergrads.
cg5280 2y ago
Many of the "good" universities in general seem more focused on prestige and acceptance rates than they do educating the masses. The Ivies could significantly expand the sizes of their student bodies (and to their credit they do make some content accessible online), but they don't because a lot of the value of a Harvard education is the exclusivity and the social network it gets you into.
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  And therein lies why a lot of Trump's base has a massive problem with them. To be fair, the exclusive social network very much includes Trump, but it spent most of the last 50 years bringing itself capital at the expense of Trump's base.
e40 2y ago
It's unfortunate that a rational discussion could not be had before the cuts were made. I can see a scenario where you and I and many others agree with cuts to many organizations.
- indoordin0saur 2y ago
  Bureaucratic organizations and special interests there are entrenched. The people managing some of these endowments are getting annual compensations competitive with the best hedge funds. If we had a rational discussion they'd just work to run out the clock and keep the status quo.
senderista 2y ago
Funding teaching is not the same as funding research. Some of the best research talent is concentrated in the Ivies.
dragonwriter 2y ago
> But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student. The funding at issue is research funding, not educational funding, and it goes to both kinds of universities (vastly more, in aggregate, to state universities than Ivies.) > Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county. If research funding is used as a lever to establish political control, those things literally do not matter, since whatever universities survive will simply be tools of totalitarian indoctrination by the regime.
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county. Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americans against the "educated coastal elites" of which it is far easier to cast Ivy league schools, professors and students as, rather than your local grocery store stock boy who is attending a tech school to go into STEM. At this point the notion of the actual issue as in: "how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education" is barely a factor in it. It's just about pitting poor people against other poor people and a handful of rich nepo-babies who are so insulated from the consequences of our system they might as well not be considered to be part of it. For anyone interested, college used to be nearly in totality funded by the state, not per student, but via the grant system. Our parents will talk about "working their way through college" working as waitstaff, because that was once an achievable thing: to work while you studied and pay your tuition, and graduate with little if any debt, and go on to do all sorts of things my generation struggles to do, like buy a home and a car, and not a run down refrigerator box and an old wreck from the side of the road that barely runs, no. They got to buy good homes, at fair prices, and cars that were if not new, really close to it. Then as with everything Reagan fucked it up, the "no more free lunch" lobby got to add another notch to their bedpost as they set about destroying yet another fucking thing funded with public money that was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing to pass yet another goddamn tax cut and worsen the ability of America to compete on the global stage.
- steveBK123 2y ago
  RE: our parents working their way through college, I think two things happened at least, yes. Reagan gutted education spending. But also the bifurcation of blue vs white collar wages really accelerated through the last 40 years. That is the spread between what my dad made working at a record store vs the professor/admin staff/etc at his college made increased tremendously. Think about it - minimum wage at federal level has only doubled in the last 40 years, while some quick googling looks like professors make 5-10x what they made 40 years ago (as most white collar has). Plus all the discussion about the bloating of college non-teaching administrative staffing.
jccalhoun 2y ago
It isn't about that efficiency. I teach at a community college and my state's republican supermajority just cut our budget by 10%.
- steveBK123 2y ago
  Oh absolutely agreed, the GOP is anti-education however you slice it. In a less partisan world, it would be nice to see a version of this that was more about efficient allocation of education dollars rather than an attack on education.
tencentshill 2y ago
It's one of the only ways people can still get into "The Club" without having a lineage of wealthy connections.
- mandmandam 2y ago
  Not a selling point. The Ivies do a hell of a lot more for 'The Club' than for the people not in it. (To be clear, I don't think giving Trump the authority to pull hundreds of millions in funding if they teach things he doesn't like, or allow anti-genocide protests etc, is in any way a solution to the above issue.)
etrautmann 2y ago
This framing is a little strange, since these universities serve multiple purposes. Much of this funding is for scientific research, which is somewhat distinct from the undergraduate teaching mission.
ahahahahah 2y ago
> All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many What a weird comparison. Yes, picking a group of universities that comprises 64 campuses is going to have more students than a group with a small fraction of that.
mattlutze 2y ago
Too many people think these are funds to just run the universities. By and large, what is being withheld are funds for research. Federally-funded academic science often looks like: 1. The university + government fund/run a project 2. Project creates new knowledge (cool!) 3. The government gets a pretty awesome license to use that knowledge 4. The government more often than not gives that knowledge away (or offers great accessible licensing), so that 5. Private industry can adapt, apply and commercialize the knowledge, driving new GDP growth and opportunities for improving life, etc. Withholding these funds ends the research projects, because Universities are not startup incubators. So the research stops, and one of the highest returning pipelines of new GDP growth for the US dries up—unless today, the professors and universities kiss the president's ring and promise to wipe out 50-100 years of human rights improvements.
- lowercased 2y ago
  It's that last step - 5 - which I think is a missing piece of the discussion. A lot of private company pharma and medical research is often doing the 'last mile' work that started in university research programs. Stuff that looks promising is picked up and commercialized, but there's usually significant work the research people have done before big commercial players take it to market. They're not doing all their research from scratch - they're taking the best bits funded by our government research programs and bringing them to market. Cutting university research will damage the private sector pretty quickly.
  - ajmurmann 2y ago
    It even goes beyond the concrete research that eventually gets commercialized. One pharma startup I am familiar with has much of its research-related leadership and board staffed with very successful current or former academic researchers who used to run their own labs or even departments. We cannot shift skill acquisition like that over night to private industry.
- timewizard 2y ago
  On #3 "government gets a pretty awesome license" seems disingenuous. From what I've witnessed some specific agencies get to use that license in a rather limited way. It's often not broadly available to the public and commercial rights tend to be reserved to the University. Is that actually what most people would think of as "pretty awesome?" On #4, "more often than not" and "offers great accessible licensing" seems equally disingenuous. Further, why should any of us have to license technology or patents that were primarily funded by tax revenue? Shouldn't that just be automatically and fully open? When the government decides to sequester that knowledge what process do I have to challenge that? On #5, outside of pharmaceutical companies, what are these new GDP growth and returning pipelines that actually get created and impact citizens directly?
onepointsixC 2y ago
The feds are funding research, which elite schools have the best faculty and scholars who are conducting the very best research. May as well as why are VC’s funding promising startups instead of less promising ones, when those promising ones have already wealthy founders who have exited their previous venture.
mmooss 2y ago
Universities have two roles: education and research. The funding is overwhelmingly for research and it's going to those that provide the best return on investment. Should cancer research funding go to your local community college? Educating the best and brightest is also of special value, but that is beside the point.
- physPop 2y ago
  I disagree -- the funding isn't ROI based at all. Heck NIH doesn't even really audit how well the funds were spent, how could they? They don't even really assess if the research had impact, save for counting journal articles and impact factors, which are in themselves poor proxies for quality of work (and easily gamed).
  - mmooss 2y ago
    What makes you say all that? Grants are hard to get, highly competitive with difficult standards.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
aidenn0 2y ago
Comparing tuition is silly, IMO. Lots of people don't pay full-price at private universities, and nobody who is in-state pays the full-price for public universities. If you care about efficiency, then divide the budget by the number of students. Harvard has a budget of about $9B, which is about 4-5x larger on a per-student basis than a few public universities I compared (I couldn't find the SUNY budget with 30s of searching, you are welcome to provide that info if you have it).
blitzar 2y ago
Universities are research institutions with loss leading teaching operations on the side.

School-Cotton 2y ago

The feds aren’t funding ivies for the purpose of education, they’re funding researchers who happen to work at the ivies to do research.

steveBK123 2y ago
Multiple people pointing this out, and absolutely right. Some question though of how all the research grants do kind of cross-subsidize the education in a way as it pays for research professors, their graduate staff, etc? Otherwise why do we collocate research and teaching?
- nine_k 2y ago
  > why do we collocate research and teaching? Because we want the same scientists who do, or recently did, advanced research to teach students? Because we want students to be involved in actual real genuine cutting-edge research? I suppose this is the logic. As a student back in the day I worked in a university lab, and it was pretty interesting to play a role in solving problems that don't have answers in the end of a textbook.
- foobiekr 2y ago
  "Otherwise why do we collocate research and teaching?" Because you need a second generation of researchers.
- jasonhong 2y ago
  This was recently discussed on Hacker News about two weeks ago. See this blog post by Steve Blank talking about the rise of research universities and why the USA is a science powerhouse. https://steveblank.com/2025/04/15/how-the-u-s-became-a-science-superpower/ https://steveblank.com/2025/04/15/how-the-u-s-became-a-scien... And the discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692360 Also, pragmatically, it's a system that has yielded incredible ROI since WW2, in terms of new industries, new companies, jobs, science, economic gains, productivity gains, and national security. The US university system is the envy of the entire world, and it's being targeted for dismantling by very petty, cruel, and incompetent people.
- onepointsixC 2y ago
  We did so because having all laboratories be government run was inefficient so in WW2 we decided to split the costs with private and public universities who will maintain labs, equipment, and the federal government will pay directly for the research.

joshuanapoli 2y ago

So far, the funding in question is research grants. There's an argument that research is more effective at the universities that have concentrated the best researchers.

mcmcmc 2y ago
There’s also an argument that public funds should go to public schools.
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  Yes, complementing an observation that there are many funding sources that aren't the Federal Government From my conversations with people, this university funding topic is a mere proxy for their disdain with Trump on every topic, in a fairly incoherent rehash of random headlines. Have found very few people willing to discuss how universities are funded like this article is. The last 75 years of interacting with the federal government and proletariat will be a footnote in these school’s half millenium history. It won’t even be controversial. Non-upper class people won’t be using them to get into corporations, a mere happenstance of the last 75 years and not what these universities view themselves as. Non-upper class people won’t be worried about how many of them are in, and what criteria is involved, and how fair. And the Federal government won’t be using their one avenue of funding to bother them about it. 75 out of 400, and then 1,000 years. A footnote. Probably laughed about. “Remember when we had $50bn from daytrading tax free and got the US government to pay for our toys every year until a total populist uprising occurred at the expense of the entire nation. Other People’s Money! Rowing club later?”
- op00to 2y ago
  What about private research institutes? They don’t really educate anyone, not in the way that people think of when they say education. Why must all funds only go to public organizations?
  - HDThoreaun 2y ago
    why should the government pay for that? If people want to do private research thats up to them

titanomachy 2y ago

Most of the money is research grants, not for training undergrads.

cg5280 2y ago

Many of the "good" universities in general seem more focused on prestige and acceptance rates than they do educating the masses. The Ivies could significantly expand the sizes of their student bodies (and to their credit they do make some content accessible online), but they don't because a lot of the value of a Harvard education is the exclusivity and the social network it gets you into.

lenerdenator 2y ago
And therein lies why a lot of Trump's base has a massive problem with them. To be fair, the exclusive social network very much includes Trump, but it spent most of the last 50 years bringing itself capital at the expense of Trump's base.

e40 2y ago

It's unfortunate that a rational discussion could not be had before the cuts were made. I can see a scenario where you and I and many others agree with cuts to many organizations.

indoordin0saur 2y ago
Bureaucratic organizations and special interests there are entrenched. The people managing some of these endowments are getting annual compensations competitive with the best hedge funds. If we had a rational discussion they'd just work to run out the clock and keep the status quo.

senderista 2y ago

Funding teaching is not the same as funding research. Some of the best research talent is concentrated in the Ivies.

dragonwriter 2y ago

> But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student. The funding at issue is research funding, not educational funding, and it goes to both kinds of universities (vastly more, in aggregate, to state universities than Ivies.) > Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county. If research funding is used as a lever to establish political control, those things literally do not matter, since whatever universities survive will simply be tools of totalitarian indoctrination by the regime.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

> BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county. Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americans against the "educated coastal elites" of which it is far easier to cast Ivy league schools, professors and students as, rather than your local grocery store stock boy who is attending a tech school to go into STEM. At this point the notion of the actual issue as in: "how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education" is barely a factor in it. It's just about pitting poor people against other poor people and a handful of rich nepo-babies who are so insulated from the consequences of our system they might as well not be considered to be part of it. For anyone interested, college used to be nearly in totality funded by the state, not per student, but via the grant system. Our parents will talk about "working their way through college" working as waitstaff, because that was once an achievable thing: to work while you studied and pay your tuition, and graduate with little if any debt, and go on to do all sorts of things my generation struggles to do, like buy a home and a car, and not a run down refrigerator box and an old wreck from the side of the road that barely runs, no. They got to buy good homes, at fair prices, and cars that were if not new, really close to it. Then as with everything Reagan fucked it up, the "no more free lunch" lobby got to add another notch to their bedpost as they set about destroying yet another fucking thing funded with public money that was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing to pass yet another goddamn tax cut and worsen the ability of America to compete on the global stage.

steveBK123 2y ago
RE: our parents working their way through college, I think two things happened at least, yes. Reagan gutted education spending. But also the bifurcation of blue vs white collar wages really accelerated through the last 40 years. That is the spread between what my dad made working at a record store vs the professor/admin staff/etc at his college made increased tremendously. Think about it - minimum wage at federal level has only doubled in the last 40 years, while some quick googling looks like professors make 5-10x what they made 40 years ago (as most white collar has). Plus all the discussion about the bloating of college non-teaching administrative staffing.

jccalhoun 2y ago

It isn't about that efficiency. I teach at a community college and my state's republican supermajority just cut our budget by 10%.

steveBK123 2y ago
Oh absolutely agreed, the GOP is anti-education however you slice it. In a less partisan world, it would be nice to see a version of this that was more about efficient allocation of education dollars rather than an attack on education.

tencentshill 2y ago

It's one of the only ways people can still get into "The Club" without having a lineage of wealthy connections.

mandmandam 2y ago
Not a selling point. The Ivies do a hell of a lot more for 'The Club' than for the people not in it. (To be clear, I don't think giving Trump the authority to pull hundreds of millions in funding if they teach things he doesn't like, or allow anti-genocide protests etc, is in any way a solution to the above issue.)

etrautmann 2y ago

This framing is a little strange, since these universities serve multiple purposes. Much of this funding is for scientific research, which is somewhat distinct from the undergraduate teaching mission.

ahahahahah 2y ago

> All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many What a weird comparison. Yes, picking a group of universities that comprises 64 campuses is going to have more students than a group with a small fraction of that.

mattlutze 2y ago

Too many people think these are funds to just run the universities. By and large, what is being withheld are funds for research. Federally-funded academic science often looks like: 1. The university + government fund/run a project 2. Project creates new knowledge (cool!) 3. The government gets a pretty awesome license to use that knowledge 4. The government more often than not gives that knowledge away (or offers great accessible licensing), so that 5. Private industry can adapt, apply and commercialize the knowledge, driving new GDP growth and opportunities for improving life, etc. Withholding these funds ends the research projects, because Universities are not startup incubators. So the research stops, and one of the highest returning pipelines of new GDP growth for the US dries up—unless today, the professors and universities kiss the president's ring and promise to wipe out 50-100 years of human rights improvements.

lowercased 2y ago
It's that last step - 5 - which I think is a missing piece of the discussion. A lot of private company pharma and medical research is often doing the 'last mile' work that started in university research programs. Stuff that looks promising is picked up and commercialized, but there's usually significant work the research people have done before big commercial players take it to market. They're not doing all their research from scratch - they're taking the best bits funded by our government research programs and bringing them to market. Cutting university research will damage the private sector pretty quickly.
- ajmurmann 2y ago
  It even goes beyond the concrete research that eventually gets commercialized. One pharma startup I am familiar with has much of its research-related leadership and board staffed with very successful current or former academic researchers who used to run their own labs or even departments. We cannot shift skill acquisition like that over night to private industry.
timewizard 2y ago
On #3 "government gets a pretty awesome license" seems disingenuous. From what I've witnessed some specific agencies get to use that license in a rather limited way. It's often not broadly available to the public and commercial rights tend to be reserved to the University. Is that actually what most people would think of as "pretty awesome?" On #4, "more often than not" and "offers great accessible licensing" seems equally disingenuous. Further, why should any of us have to license technology or patents that were primarily funded by tax revenue? Shouldn't that just be automatically and fully open? When the government decides to sequester that knowledge what process do I have to challenge that? On #5, outside of pharmaceutical companies, what are these new GDP growth and returning pipelines that actually get created and impact citizens directly?

onepointsixC 2y ago

The feds are funding research, which elite schools have the best faculty and scholars who are conducting the very best research. May as well as why are VC’s funding promising startups instead of less promising ones, when those promising ones have already wealthy founders who have exited their previous venture.

mmooss 2y ago

Universities have two roles: education and research. The funding is overwhelmingly for research and it's going to those that provide the best return on investment. Should cancer research funding go to your local community college? Educating the best and brightest is also of special value, but that is beside the point.

physPop 2y ago
I disagree -- the funding isn't ROI based at all. Heck NIH doesn't even really audit how well the funds were spent, how could they? They don't even really assess if the research had impact, save for counting journal articles and impact factors, which are in themselves poor proxies for quality of work (and easily gamed).
- mmooss 2y ago
  What makes you say all that? Grants are hard to get, highly competitive with difficult standards.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

aidenn0 2y ago

Comparing tuition is silly, IMO. Lots of people don't pay full-price at private universities, and nobody who is in-state pays the full-price for public universities. If you care about efficiency, then divide the budget by the number of students. Harvard has a budget of about $9B, which is about 4-5x larger on a per-student basis than a few public universities I compared (I couldn't find the SUNY budget with 30s of searching, you are welcome to provide that info if you have it).

blitzar 2y ago

Universities are research institutions with loss leading teaching operations on the side.