5 ms·

The people I know who work in life sciences R&D (basically anything bio) have had their funding absolutely annihilated. PhDs with 20 years of experience working

• gosub100 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  • counters 10mo ago
    Legitimate question: why don't you think universities already do this? It's not exactly a novel idea.
    • gosub100 10mo ago
      It can be proved by deduction based on the rate of increase in tuition
      • counters 10mo ago
        I didn't ask you to prove it. I asked why it wasn't already happening.
      • secabeen 10mo ago
        Which tuition are you referring to? Nameplate tuition is like the sticker price on a new car; few to no people pay it. Net tuition is the number that actually matters, and it's been largely flat the last 8 years.
        • gosub100 10mo ago
          So you're saying academics use the same opaque market practices as, e.g. health insurance? Yeah all the more reasons to cut funding. If they have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear with transparency.
          • lesuorac 10mo ago
            What's not transparent? We know this information because the colleges give it out. They are transparent. There's not much the colleges can do if somebody is commenting without researching.
          • epistasis 10mo ago
            You seem to have no interest in transparance or understanding, but answer everything with "cut the universities" no matter what. If differential pricing based on ability to pay is a reason to destroy something, then we had better destroy 90% of B2B. But it's not a reason, you're just parroting the same desired end result no matter what is actually said about universities.
        • danaris 10mo ago
          I don't know the figures for large universities, but at the small liberal arts college I graduated from and the one I've worked at for the last 15 years, the average figure for "full pay" students—which, as the name suggests, is the students who pay, or whose families pay, the full sticker price, either directly or through loans—has generally been between 46% and 53%. Now, if you have figures showing that what you claim is true on the whole across all of US higher education, please, by all means, post the links. I'm genuinely interested to know just how different it is with the larger universities.
  • miltonlost 10mo ago
    No, the Trump administration needs to not cut funding for science that disagrees with their worldview.
    • gosub100 10mo ago
      They need to cut funding until academia stops gamifying the research process. Aka cheating. It's bizarre to hear the stories that come out of this twisted world and then seeing them expect to keep getting paid the same.
      • vkou 10mo ago
        It's bizarre to hear the words that come out of this administration's mouth on... Almost any topic, and then see an actual person actually arguing that anything those people say or do needs to be defended. Have you considered holding it to the same standard you want to hold your enemies to?
        • gosub100 10mo ago
          Not everyone is a tribalist.i don't have to agree with everything Trump does. Do you not know that? Or does the world feel safer when you split people into simple categories? Academia in particular loves to push one-track thought and cancel culture. Hard to believe it used to be a place for diverse thought and DIScourse. Now if you disagree with the groupthink you are a racist. It's a very 2001 George Bush "you are either with us or against us" culture that absolutely deserves to have its funding cut.
      • biophysboy 10mo ago
        Do you genuinely believe that every single research lab is cheating and should thus be punished across the board?
        • epistasis 10mo ago
          Whenever I have dug into views like these, this is not a rational view based on first principles, it's about carrying out culture war based on a very odd phrase I heard first here on Hacker News: "elite conflict." Destruction of scientific research is viewed as a positive win for the culture war. The particulars, what's actually happening with science, is completely secondary to discrediting the institution as a whole.
  • re-thc 10mo ago
    > Maybe colleges should use some of that tuition money That's going away too with the ban on immigration. A large amount of high margin tuition is from overseas students.
    • FuriouslyAdrift 10mo ago
      Overseas students are not immigrants. They are on student visas (and most likely from very wealthy families... at least most of the ones I knew at Purdue were). It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students as they graduate and create a system to promote student visa to green card to naturalization, but only a very few do. Mostly, foreign students are price gouged by our universities to prop up a failing business model and make it more difficult for citizens to afford higher education.
      • danaris 10mo ago
        > Overseas students are not immigrants. > It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students Yeah? Tell that to the US government. As it stands, foreign student enrollment has dropped precipitously year-on-year. The international students are scared, and with good reason. If ICE happens to roll up to campus, do you really think they'll be checking each student's visa status? Not on your life. They'll just round up everyone who doesn't look white enough, and if they're very, very lucky, they might just get sent back home in a speedy manner. If they're not, they'll get put in camps for indeterminate amounts of time, denied any access to the legal system, and treated worse than animals.
      • notahacker 10mo ago
        Sure, it's in the United States' interest to retain the best foreign students (and in many students' interest to study in a country which will permit them to live and work there after their study). That doesn't mean the current administration is necessarily inclined to act this way International student enrolment is down 17% this year, because the administration chose to take a broadly similar approach to student visas as they did to immigration, with a "pause" on interviews and lots of revocations, plus of course the concern their lawful student visa status isn't a guarantee they won't get taken off to processing centres by ICE thugs with quotas to hit. Other bright ideas the administration proposed with include a four year student visa limit to rule out the possibility of completing a PhD in a normal time frame. That's gonna hurt universities using the foreign students to prop their business up, and citizens who'll have to pick up their tab instead if they want their courses to continue...
  • plorg 10mo ago
    This is not how research grants work.
  • biophysboy 10mo ago
    An average NIH R01 grant is $600,000 dollars per year for ~5 years. Forgoing a $100m student center would net you 33 projects. For reference, Stanford had 1000 ongoing projects for FY 2025
    • stefan_ 10mo ago
      If universities fund it themselves they might forego some of the usual 30% administrative grift and we get some 40 projects out of it!
      • biophysboy 10mo ago
        More nonsense - indirect costs fund shared facilities, equipment, supplies, and data resources. To the extent that there is bloat, it funds the compliance that they are required by law to do. I would support simplifying this to reduce regulatory cost; I do not support paranoid whining.
        • stefan_ 10mo ago
          The ratio has just been going up and up and up, and to suggest it pays for "equipment, supplies and data resources" is a bad joke considering the people doing the work end up saddled with yet more administrative bloat in the form of hostile, complicated processes in accessing the funds to buy the very equipment and supplies that enables the research.
          • ModernMech 10mo ago
            > The ratio has just been going up and up and up That's because organizations get bigger as projects become more complicated and varied. Larger organizations require more overhead as a percentage of the operating costs. 30 years ago many schools didn't even have Computer Science departments. Today schools are now starting to stand up Artificial Intelligence departments. It's not cheap to maintain these organizations. Anyway, it really comes down to a simple tension: you can have big science, good science, or cheap science. Choose two. For a long time we've optimized for big and good. This has yielded dividends in terms of science and technology output, but it's very expensive. Yet, the ROI is decidedly, emphatically positive. For some reason people seem to think we can do this all cheaper, somehow, by pulling funding and making all these organizations smaller. I don't see how this is possible, because it relies on an uncanny ability to predict which projects will succeed and fail ahead of time. What I think will happen is the money will dry up, the talent will go to places that want to spend the money, and the remaining programs will be cheap, small-stakes research better suited for the 20th century, unable to compete with countries that actually want to invest in the future.
• SubiculumCode 10mo ago
  Our lab is scrambling, spending all our time writing grants, not conducting science. It is so frustrating and wasteful.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • ModernMech 10mo ago
    This is why I became a teaching professor. My employment and promotion are not conditioned on how much money I bring in and what I publish. But I still get to spend 4 months of the year doing research that's important to me. I don't publish as often but when I do, it's substantive work. I've seen too many promising academic careers torched at 6-years because they had unfundable ideas. With this new administration, we see how "fundability" and "good important research" are often at odds and can change as quickly as the political winds. When I was in gradschool it was over drones and the politics was within the FAA and their shifting definitions of what an "unmanned aerial vehicle" technically was. Recently you wouldn't get funding if you didn't have the word "equity" in your proposal. Now you don't get funding if you do have the word "equity" in your proposal. New boss, same as old boss. Heaven forbid you were researching suddenly now <VORBOTEN> topic, your entire career is torched. I just didn't want to tie my career to that kind of capriciousness.
  • timr 10mo ago
    This was true when I was a grad student, decades ago. It was true when I worked in a lab as an undergraduate before that. Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.
    • epistasis 10mo ago
      But clearly there was some science going on. Any time spent writing grants rather than doing research feels wasteful, but it's the way to get funding. The percentage of time spent doing that is changing, and the percentage of grants applications that get funding is going way down, demonstrating a big change in the amount of effort that goes directly to waste. Unfunded grants are not evidence of bad research that does not get funded, but merely of the funding level.
• epolanski 10mo ago
  Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs. If a private lab needs a chemist or biologist for say, quality assurance, one of the most common jobs in the field, then privates prefer fresh graduates: - they cost much less - even if the PhD would be fine with the pay, he/she will still be skipped over a fresh graduate because the person is over qualified and will jump to something more related to his/her field as soon as possible. Thus these people's CV are genuinely worse for anything unrelated to their skill set.
  • reilly3000 10mo ago
    Even if you’re looking outside your field, the prestige of a PHD is offset by the fact that they assume (accurately) you’d rather be elsewhere.
  • jkubicek 10mo ago
    I haven't been on the job market as a new PhD in (my god) nearly 20 years now, but at the time I was looking for work, having a PhD on my resume was the only reason I was able to snag interviews at Apple/Google/McKinsey/Bain/Twitter/etc. I never did anything related to my actual degree, but it certainly opened doors for me.
    • epolanski 10mo ago
      Times have changed, also, it might be related to the field. Natural sciences such as biology or chemistry are different from physics or maths or engineering fields.
  • bonsai_spool 10mo ago
    > Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs. Depends on the market, which is true for any field. In places where there's a lot of technical work to be done, employers can hire PhD's and will do so if there's a local supply.
  • svara 10mo ago
    You picked an example to support your conclusion in mentioning QA jobs which typically don't require a PhD. There still very much are other jobs that do require a PhD so I don't see what the point is there. More fundamentally this mentality of looking at education only through the lens of financial return is just so disappointing. Of course your country is self-sabotaging its science system if it's full of people who think that way. I can pretty safely say that me and most people around me, when we got our PhDs, what job we'd later get really wasn't the primary concern. We wanted to work on interesting problems at the frontier of what's known (and maybe also get a job doing that later).
• exceptione 10mo ago
  > It might take decades to recover our research programs. Mission completed. Make sure the plane will never fly again.
• neoromantique 10mo ago
  >4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs. It's very optimistic to think that this madness is going to end in four years. The idiocracy is a global trend