4 ms·

I don't know the situation at MIT in particular but overall creating some budgetary pressures for universities is probably a good thing. Every since it became n

I don't know the situation at MIT in particular but overall creating some budgetary pressures for universities is probably a good thing. Every since it became near impossible to discharge student debt due to legislation in the Bush presidency that was designed to make student loans more easily available, the money spigot has been opened far too wide and this is largely funded by debt taken on by 18 year olds who aren't particularly good at making decisions. The result has been a massive amount or real-estate acquisition and a crazy growth in the administrative staff. I recently saw a Brown undergraduate talk about how they pay 90K a year because they have one administrative non-teaching staff for every two undergraduates. I went to the college directory of my own college and was amazed at the number of administrative staff relative to teaching staff. It was absolutely nothing like this in the late 90s. And the teaching itself is being eviscerated with adjunct professors and grad students being asked to do teaching and getting paid next to nothing. And you have universities complaining about how they don't have enough funding for research and they need MOOAAR. Like many government interventions, no matter how well intentioned, the Bush era legislation has led to much bigger problems existed then. It think it's a great that universities are being forced to tighten their belts and I hope this continues for at least a few years until some sanity prevails again in US higher education. Making student debt, particularly that taken on by 18 year olds who graduated with something like an English literature degree would do a lot to rectify the problems that have been created.

gowld 5mo ago
The article is about graduate school, not undergrad. You can tell from the title.
- voncheese 5mo ago
  Unless I'm missing something, the linked article from MIT is about more than graduate students. That article talks about how changes introduced in 2025 are causing taxation on budgets that (as far as I can tell) affect all students. The prior poster is making the case that might not be a bad thing, but its not just graduate students
CryptoBanker 5mo ago
Please use some line breaks. I find this extremely difficult to read
kakacik 5mo ago
Investing in educated population in future is investment in given society itself. Triple that for US where most folks remain in adulthood, so brain drain aint an issue. State/society would get those money 10x back easily. But then who could push through some redneck agenda that is actively harmful to future of given society, but with apropriate emotional charge to ruffle feathers and get people into voting against themselves. You need simple people that can easily believe the dumbest shit you can cone up with. Smart educated folks usually know better, definitely on average. I dont claim there is some big conspiracy around this, that would be too convenient copout when human greed and stupidity is enough, but it would make a typical Bond villain chess move. Really, there is no good excuse for public education to not be accessible to whole public. Unless you want class based society, which US in many regards is and will be for foreseeable future.
nostrademons 5mo ago
It may be good but also can be very problematic. Organizations don't really shrink well. When times are good, they hire a lot of people that are marginally necessary. Over the good times, these roles become well-integrated into how the organization does business; whether or not they were necessary at first, people start depending on that person for a task, their approvals become part of a critical workflow, they develop special institutional knowledge without which the institution won't function, etc. When the organization needs to shrink, the marginally-necessary roles all get laid off. Except now you have all these unfilled dependencies. Other remaining employees depend upon the now-gone employees to do their jobs. Communication processes break. People get demoralized as they realize the organization is broken anyway, and quiet-quit or start looking out for their own self-interest. You run into Gall's Law in action: "A complex system that doesn't work cannot be patched up to make it work: you have to start over with a working simple system." Lots and lots of things are going to break as fertility declines and the population shrinks. Education is going to be one of the first ones hit because it explicitly deals with young people, but likely this will go right up to capitalism and the state.
- ModernMech 5mo ago
  I'll give a real example. In my department we have research staff to look at research proposals and make sure they're good before they're submitted to the grant agency. Someone might look at the budget and say "This is administrative bloat because it is not teaching focused so we are cutting them." What's the downstream effect? Well now those professors who relied on the research staff have to take time out of their schedules to do deeper reviews of their work, so they reduce teaching time and increase research time. They are not as skilled as the dedicated staff, so now there are fewer proposals being accepted. This means less money to the university, and particularly the department. So what does the department do? They stop hiring undergraduate graders and they institute a hiring freeze. Now that means they cannot admit as many students, teaching costs go up, class sizes go up. And for the admitted students, now they've lost their work study, so it means fewer students are going to enroll because their aid has decreased, effectively increasing tuition. This can be a vicious downward spiral if not checked. So the original intent of "tighten belts and reduce waste" is really "we made everything worse for everyone"
strix_varius 5mo ago
Most of what you've said is true, but also largely unrelated to the content of the article, which is about funding research.
- ClarityJones 5mo ago
  It's relevant in that the article mentions "research" 13 times, but "education" only 3 times.
  - watwut 5mo ago
    Cause the article is about research. It is actually fully OK to have speech or message focusing on research.
secabeen 5mo ago
I know this is a common argument, but I would love to see some hard data about expenditures on administrative staff in Universities. Every time I look for this, I find that the expenditures on administrators has mostly gone up in the Health Care sectors of Higher Education. Instructional, student affairs and research administrators are up modestly. Do you have any sources or citations to support the broad claims about increases in administrators or broad surplus revenue? As non-profits, if tuition is going up and all other fund sources are flat, then expenditures have to go up as well, there is no owner's profit to absorb excess revenue. The best data I has is from the Education department, see the last part of this chart (Expenditure per full-time-equivalent student in constant 2022-23 dollars): https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_334.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_334.10.a...
ModernMech 5mo ago
I agree there are real problems in higher education. But the explanation that universities simply became bloated because student loan money was too easy is very incomplete. At universities like MIT, Stanford and others, many undergraduates do not pay anything close to sticker price. Students from lower and middle income families often receive major aid, and in some cases pay no tuition at all. Full tuition is paid mostly by wealthy families and international students. I myself went to the most expensive university in the country circa 2005, but paid less than state school because they gave me a bunch of grants (not mere loans). For this reason, undergraduate education is mostly break even or a loss leader at many institutions. Tuition inflation is also tied to inequality. If very wealthy families can pay $60k-$90k a year out of pocket, elite universities can set prices at that level, acting as upward price pressure in the broader market. That's just the magic of the market dynamics at work. > I went to the college directory of my own college and was amazed at the number of administrative staff relative to teaching staff. Some bureaucracy may be wasteful, but some exists because modern research universities are genuinely complex institutions. Yes, fewer administrators are tied to teaching, but a professor's job is only about 30% teaching, and classes are not in session 25% of the year. I never understand this idea that all or most of the administrative staff at a university must go toward teaching or else something is wrong / broken. Large universities are small research communities verging on city status, not mere schools. If you want mere schools we have those in various forms (SLACs, community colleges, trade schools, etc.), but it seems to me people also want all the advanced stuff coming out of the research output these universities produce. The higher the tower of knowledge, the more it's going to cost to build on and maintain it, and the costs don't go up linearly. > And you have universities complaining about how they don't have enough funding for research and they need MOOAAR. Research is also and expensive loss leader. Labs, buildings, equipment, safety systems, compliance, grant administration all cost a lot of money, to the point that research is also a loss leader. At my institution we charge about 65% overhead on research grants, but for every research dollar we bring in, it costs 70 more cents for the university to support said research. The upside is that these universities produce enormous value in the form of scientific discoveries, medical advances, new startups, an educated workforce, and regional economic growth. They bring in foreign and nonlocal money and spend much of it locally. Many of them are economic engines in places that otherwise would be considered "flyover country", acting as an anchor for educators and their families, students, and that attracts hospitals, other schools, restaurants, and suddenly a local economy is formed. You think there would be any economic activity at State College, PA if it weren't for Penn State University? It'd just be another part of Pennsyltucky. Instead there's a whole thriving town there; per capita, State College is in the top 5 economic regions in PA, and Penn State as a whole accounts for 10% of employment in PA (it's not a coincidence the other top 4 economic regions in PA are full of colleges and universities). https://www.statecollege.com/centre-county-gazette/penn-state-powers-pennsylvanias-economy-with-15-8b-impact/ https://www.statecollege.com/centre-county-gazette/penn-stat... So yes, universities should control costs, reduce administrative excess, and protect students from bad debt like you said. But simply starving them of funding risks damaging one of America’s most productive assets. The better goal is a funding model that reduces student debt, preserves world-class research, demands accountability, and recognizes that valuable institutions are not cheap to run. But that's not what's happening, not even close.
cbsmith 5mo ago
He he. If you think the costs for an education will go down because they're seeing fewer applications and they're getting less funding from other sources, I have bad news for you.
weichi 5mo ago
I'm won't claim that universities don't have a problem with adminstrative bloat, but looking at simple top-line numbers like number of non-teaching staff can easily be misleading. I don't know about Brown specifically, but schools like MIT receive large amounts of federal funding to do research. Administrating that funding requires staffing (paperwork for proposals, contracting, accounting, invoicing, etc). MIT probably also has non-teaching research staff that are entirely grant-funded. I'd be surprised if undergrad tuition is paying for any of this.
ckemere 5mo ago
Further counter argument- It seems that (elite) undergraduate students care about their professors research (versus just teaching). Else Harvey Mudd would be much much harder to get into compared with MIT?
argomo 5mo ago
Unfortunately, when you try to starve the beast, it's the essential functions that get slashed instead of the leadership and adminstrative apparatus. The animal is harmed further while the parasite intercepts the generated value.

gowld 5mo ago

The article is about graduate school, not undergrad. You can tell from the title.

voncheese 5mo ago
Unless I'm missing something, the linked article from MIT is about more than graduate students. That article talks about how changes introduced in 2025 are causing taxation on budgets that (as far as I can tell) affect all students. The prior poster is making the case that might not be a bad thing, but its not just graduate students

CryptoBanker 5mo ago

Please use some line breaks. I find this extremely difficult to read

kakacik 5mo ago

Investing in educated population in future is investment in given society itself. Triple that for US where most folks remain in adulthood, so brain drain aint an issue. State/society would get those money 10x back easily. But then who could push through some redneck agenda that is actively harmful to future of given society, but with apropriate emotional charge to ruffle feathers and get people into voting against themselves. You need simple people that can easily believe the dumbest shit you can cone up with. Smart educated folks usually know better, definitely on average. I dont claim there is some big conspiracy around this, that would be too convenient copout when human greed and stupidity is enough, but it would make a typical Bond villain chess move. Really, there is no good excuse for public education to not be accessible to whole public. Unless you want class based society, which US in many regards is and will be for foreseeable future.

nostrademons 5mo ago

It may be good but also can be very problematic. Organizations don't really shrink well. When times are good, they hire a lot of people that are marginally necessary. Over the good times, these roles become well-integrated into how the organization does business; whether or not they were necessary at first, people start depending on that person for a task, their approvals become part of a critical workflow, they develop special institutional knowledge without which the institution won't function, etc. When the organization needs to shrink, the marginally-necessary roles all get laid off. Except now you have all these unfilled dependencies. Other remaining employees depend upon the now-gone employees to do their jobs. Communication processes break. People get demoralized as they realize the organization is broken anyway, and quiet-quit or start looking out for their own self-interest. You run into Gall's Law in action: "A complex system that doesn't work cannot be patched up to make it work: you have to start over with a working simple system." Lots and lots of things are going to break as fertility declines and the population shrinks. Education is going to be one of the first ones hit because it explicitly deals with young people, but likely this will go right up to capitalism and the state.

ModernMech 5mo ago
I'll give a real example. In my department we have research staff to look at research proposals and make sure they're good before they're submitted to the grant agency. Someone might look at the budget and say "This is administrative bloat because it is not teaching focused so we are cutting them." What's the downstream effect? Well now those professors who relied on the research staff have to take time out of their schedules to do deeper reviews of their work, so they reduce teaching time and increase research time. They are not as skilled as the dedicated staff, so now there are fewer proposals being accepted. This means less money to the university, and particularly the department. So what does the department do? They stop hiring undergraduate graders and they institute a hiring freeze. Now that means they cannot admit as many students, teaching costs go up, class sizes go up. And for the admitted students, now they've lost their work study, so it means fewer students are going to enroll because their aid has decreased, effectively increasing tuition. This can be a vicious downward spiral if not checked. So the original intent of "tighten belts and reduce waste" is really "we made everything worse for everyone"

strix_varius 5mo ago

Most of what you've said is true, but also largely unrelated to the content of the article, which is about funding research.

ClarityJones 5mo ago
It's relevant in that the article mentions "research" 13 times, but "education" only 3 times.
- watwut 5mo ago
  Cause the article is about research. It is actually fully OK to have speech or message focusing on research.

secabeen 5mo ago

I know this is a common argument, but I would love to see some hard data about expenditures on administrative staff in Universities. Every time I look for this, I find that the expenditures on administrators has mostly gone up in the Health Care sectors of Higher Education. Instructional, student affairs and research administrators are up modestly. Do you have any sources or citations to support the broad claims about increases in administrators or broad surplus revenue? As non-profits, if tuition is going up and all other fund sources are flat, then expenditures have to go up as well, there is no owner's profit to absorb excess revenue. The best data I has is from the Education department, see the last part of this chart (Expenditure per full-time-equivalent student in constant 2022-23 dollars): https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_334.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_334.10.a...

ModernMech 5mo ago

I agree there are real problems in higher education. But the explanation that universities simply became bloated because student loan money was too easy is very incomplete. At universities like MIT, Stanford and others, many undergraduates do not pay anything close to sticker price. Students from lower and middle income families often receive major aid, and in some cases pay no tuition at all. Full tuition is paid mostly by wealthy families and international students. I myself went to the most expensive university in the country circa 2005, but paid less than state school because they gave me a bunch of grants (not mere loans). For this reason, undergraduate education is mostly break even or a loss leader at many institutions. Tuition inflation is also tied to inequality. If very wealthy families can pay $60k-$90k a year out of pocket, elite universities can set prices at that level, acting as upward price pressure in the broader market. That's just the magic of the market dynamics at work. > I went to the college directory of my own college and was amazed at the number of administrative staff relative to teaching staff. Some bureaucracy may be wasteful, but some exists because modern research universities are genuinely complex institutions. Yes, fewer administrators are tied to teaching, but a professor's job is only about 30% teaching, and classes are not in session 25% of the year. I never understand this idea that all or most of the administrative staff at a university must go toward teaching or else something is wrong / broken. Large universities are small research communities verging on city status, not mere schools. If you want mere schools we have those in various forms (SLACs, community colleges, trade schools, etc.), but it seems to me people also want all the advanced stuff coming out of the research output these universities produce. The higher the tower of knowledge, the more it's going to cost to build on and maintain it, and the costs don't go up linearly. > And you have universities complaining about how they don't have enough funding for research and they need MOOAAR. Research is also and expensive loss leader. Labs, buildings, equipment, safety systems, compliance, grant administration all cost a lot of money, to the point that research is also a loss leader. At my institution we charge about 65% overhead on research grants, but for every research dollar we bring in, it costs 70 more cents for the university to support said research. The upside is that these universities produce enormous value in the form of scientific discoveries, medical advances, new startups, an educated workforce, and regional economic growth. They bring in foreign and nonlocal money and spend much of it locally. Many of them are economic engines in places that otherwise would be considered "flyover country", acting as an anchor for educators and their families, students, and that attracts hospitals, other schools, restaurants, and suddenly a local economy is formed. You think there would be any economic activity at State College, PA if it weren't for Penn State University? It'd just be another part of Pennsyltucky. Instead there's a whole thriving town there; per capita, State College is in the top 5 economic regions in PA, and Penn State as a whole accounts for 10% of employment in PA (it's not a coincidence the other top 4 economic regions in PA are full of colleges and universities). https://www.statecollege.com/centre-county-gazette/penn-state-powers-pennsylvanias-economy-with-15-8b-impact/ https://www.statecollege.com/centre-county-gazette/penn-stat... So yes, universities should control costs, reduce administrative excess, and protect students from bad debt like you said. But simply starving them of funding risks damaging one of America’s most productive assets. The better goal is a funding model that reduces student debt, preserves world-class research, demands accountability, and recognizes that valuable institutions are not cheap to run. But that's not what's happening, not even close.

cbsmith 5mo ago

He he. If you think the costs for an education will go down because they're seeing fewer applications and they're getting less funding from other sources, I have bad news for you.

weichi 5mo ago

I'm won't claim that universities don't have a problem with adminstrative bloat, but looking at simple top-line numbers like number of non-teaching staff can easily be misleading. I don't know about Brown specifically, but schools like MIT receive large amounts of federal funding to do research. Administrating that funding requires staffing (paperwork for proposals, contracting, accounting, invoicing, etc). MIT probably also has non-teaching research staff that are entirely grant-funded. I'd be surprised if undergrad tuition is paying for any of this.

ckemere 5mo ago

Further counter argument- It seems that (elite) undergraduate students care about their professors research (versus just teaching). Else Harvey Mudd would be much much harder to get into compared with MIT?

argomo 5mo ago

Unfortunately, when you try to starve the beast, it's the essential functions that get slashed instead of the leadership and adminstrative apparatus. The animal is harmed further while the parasite intercepts the generated value.