Hacker News Reader

It's sad that there seems to be little internal critique coming from within universities of the complete takeover of schools by administrators. When it does happen it's almost entirely the result of some external rumblings or a direct affront like this being twisted.

I guess it's because these same administrators ultimately control the narratives (and budgets, jobs, etc) coming from the schools, creating a self-protecting cycle which only generates more administrative power.

So when attempts to curtail their power happen they can twist it to make it seem like it's an attack on teachers, students, and research - instead of the separate group of people who consume the greatest amount of resources within the school, who don't generate the positive research and economic utility for which universities are typically known.

Which is a shame, because there are probably no better people to stand up for this than the professors and researchers. Plenty of research has shown these people and their work aren't responsible for the massive increase in tuition and costs associated with schools. Yet the problem is perpetually the amount of revenue and income the school can make, not how it's being used.

U.S. university students who feel that they are getting a bad deal should go to Europe.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32821678

Think twice about beginning a bachelor, masters, or doctoral degree in this country, as you will be crushed with debt.

With a lot of work, I was able to graduate in '94 with an E.E. degree with a total student loan debt of $1,500. That is not possible here anymore, but it is possible in Europe.

If I had to do it again, I would be gone.

I was able to graduate with an EE degree, within the past five years and with no debt at Cal Poly (a university with one of the highest ROI on the west coast). <$7000/year is certainly doable if you're living at home with your parents.

To be honest, I spent a year living at home, but my college of engineering was 60 miles away. I lived near campus otherwise.

With the new tax regulation, as a U.S. citizen, do you have to pay taxes on tuition and stipends you receive when you do a Ph.D. overseas? (I'd assume so, since overseas income is taxable AFAIK, but I don't really know what the situation is).

Tuition would be much lower, I think you are credited for the taxes you would pay in country, and generally - while you have to report foreign income - you have to make quite a bit before tax would be assessed.

I thought it was "only" $100,000? Seems like a lot of engineering types would be close to that limit.

For a job after university probably, but I meant to speak to a tuition waiver at a foreign university. I doubt tuition waiver plus stipend would approach that in most other countries.

Even for the job scenario, you get a tax credit for foreign taxes paid which in most industialized countries would probably neutralize any US tax burden and then some. If the job is in a developing country, I would think the cost of living advantages would make it worth it if you were above the limit.

However, not a CPA or finance pro. I went to grad school abroad and looked into the implications of staying a bit.

> It's sad that there seems to be little internal critique coming from within universities of the complete takeover of schools by administrators

This is just patently false.

The criticism of admin bloat by faculty and students precedes the right-wing press criticism by decades, is far more harsh, and is still going strong.

The whole damn criticism, as it exists in the popular press today, can be traced quite directly back to academia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Ginsberg_(political_s...

Or a more recent example, https://home.isi.org/sites/default/files/MA59.3_Seery_Sympos...

And from the student perspective, the recent votes at places like Chicago to unionize (and, more importantly, the justification provided by the student groups that organized those votes)

Far from complicit, faculty and students are leading the charge, and have been since the 1980s.

BTW, if you wanted to curtail administrative bloat/power in universities, there are ways to use the tax code and science funding policy to do so. and lots of serious policy proposals by the people listed above would very likely have great effect.

This policy targets students instead.

> BTW, if you wanted to curtail administrative bloat/power in universities, there are ways to use the tax code and science funding policy to do so.

Can you give a summary of your proposals here? Skimmed the Seery article and it doesn't seem to have anything directly related to the tax code, but could be missing it.

> And from the student perspective, the recent votes at places like Chicago to unionize (and, more importantly, the justification provided by the student groups that organized those votes)

I'm at a school that underwent a grad student unionisation drive, and pretty much everything that the union proposed would have amounted to further empowering the administration at the expense of the academics (e.g. introducing new mediator officials with extensive compulsive power over advisors if their students should feel wronged in one way or another, hiring more staff to enforce diversity-friendly admissions and hiring outcomes, ...). At least the politicised end of the student body seems to consider the administration, rather than the academics, to be their natural ally.

This is debatable and its own rabbit hole that is beat to death on other recent stories. But anyways, I understand the point, and this is why I stated:

> and, more importantly, the justification provided by the student groups that organized those votes

I'm sorry that I can't provide more details or evidence (lest I leak bits of identifying information), but as far as I can tell, our union has not made any statement to the effect of considering excessive administrative power or even bloat an issue.

An incompetent advisor can ruin a promising grad student.

Whether the union position on who should be empowered here has merit is orthogonal to the question of whether unions are broadly for expanding or reducing administrative power, no?

Your argument is simplistic and over generalizing... but it is a good example of the ideological battles we see in society. You’d probably find high demand that would justify the hiring of support staff to represent students vs faculty and vs admins in many cases. Whether this expands or decreases an administration is irrelevant. The goal of unionization is a collective voice that is acknowledged.

> It's sad that there seems to be little internal critique coming from within universities of the complete takeover of schools by administrators.

According to the White House, everything in the executive branch is going wonderfully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> he addresses it quite clearly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This tax is still a ridiculous solution. If the problem is that university grant structures are screwed up (which they certainly are), then fix the broken grant structures. As I understand it, they're the result of a ridiculous arrangement between universities and the grant agencies, most of which are the federal government. So tell the federal government to stop issuing grants under stupid terms. Set an overhead structure, require grantees to pay their grad students, and require that all student compensation paid out of the grants go straight to the students.

Or tax the universites, not the students.

> As I understand it, they're the result of a ridiculous arrangement between universities and the grant agencies

Do you have any links for further reading on this point? I'm not familiar with this argument, but could well believe it.

> This tax is still a ridiculous solution. If the problem is that university grant structures are screwed up (which they certainly are), then fix the broken grant structures.

Other way around. It's not that tuition grants are being treated specially if they're taxed. All grants and material benefits of this nature are considered taxable by the IRS. Graduate tuition happens to have been given a special exemption from being taxable, and this bill is aimed at eliminating that special exemption, treating it like all other grants and material employment benefits.

> Or tax the universites, not the students.

There are two problems with this. First, the incidence of the tax (who actually ends up paying) is completely unrelated to who the IRS collects the tax from. This is why, even though employers are required to pay half of taxes for Social Security and Medicare, employees are the ones who bear the tax burden: 95% of any increases in FICA taxes are paid for by employees (via adjustments to wages and salaries), and vice versa.

> 95% of any increases in FICA taxes are paid for by employees (via adjustments to wages and salaries)

What evidence indicates it's 95% and not 20% or 80% or 99%?

> What evidence indicates it's 95% and not 20% or 80% or 99%?

I'm not sure I understand your question. If you're asking the method by which this is done, it's a pretty straightforward econometric analysis problem - any graduate student probably does something similar in their first year.

If you're asking what the exact percentage is, I don't know. I remember it's in the range of 90% or 95%, but not the exact number. (It also varies slightly with economic cycles anyway, because the main determinant is the relative elasticities of supply and demand for labor).

> I'm not sure I understand your question.

I'm asking for a citation.

There’s also a massive grad student bubble; for each hundred grad students who earn a Ph.D. that only qualifies them to become a professor, there’s maybe one tenure track professorship. This directly leads to exploitative situations—for example, the surplus of people with postgraduate degrees allows universities to hire adjuncts to teach undergrads at subsistence wages or worse. If you’re not going to establish lots of new national laboratories to soak up that excess talent, the least you can do is stop producing that surplus.

People seem to forget this, but there are jobs outside of academia.

This would depend on the field, right? Ie in some fields are there possibly more jobs outside of academia (than within) that require a PhD, alleviating the pressure to progress from PhD->Prof?

There are few jobs outside of academia where postgraduate degrees in liberal arts are a meaningful qualification. STEM can be hit or miss—a physics or math Ph.D. may be highly employable, but not especially more than someone with similar talent and ambition who invested their time in more marketable experience.

If I were the federal budget czar, I would literally pump tens to hundreds of billions of dollars into opening national labs and hiring these STEM postgrads to do basic research. Figuring out how to efficiently produce something like high-temperature superconductors, carbon nanotubes, fusion power, carbon sequestration, gene therapy, etc. would solve some very fundamental problems, likely produce a huge return on investment, and gainfully employ thousands of highly educated people who are woefully underutilized. Even less outwardly ambitious research can produce value: look at what happened when the federal government wanted to build a more resilient computer network for DARPA.

But I’m not that czar, and I think subsidizing people into career dead ends is something we could stand to do less of.

In STEM (perhaps!) but not in the humanities.

The vast majority of which don't need, and hence don't effectively utilize a Ph.D.

Most of those jobs can be performed as well, if not better, by people with an undergrad degree, possibly with a master's tacked on + equiv number of years on the job for experience as opposed to the Ph.D.

Completely agree. This tax code change is clearly the closure of a loophole. Universities should make changes to reflect that and decide what their priorities are. If they choose not to support grad students, that's on them.

This doesn't make sense to me. If the "loophole" is having grad students pay tuition, then wouldn't the school still have to pay income tax on that tuition? If the issue is that they don't want this money going to tuition at all, then they could simply craft the rules around use that way.

It seems to me there are many ways around this. The republicans have always had an anti-university narrative. I wouldn't blame people for assuming that this tax bill is indeed just another part of that.