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Comment by blindriver | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty telling that schools like Penn don't cut their administrators, but instead they cut their admissions.

"Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment which grew by 78%.

When we look at individual schools the numbers are just as striking. A recent report I authored found that on average, the top 50 schools have 1 faculty per 11 students whereas the same institutions have 1 non-faculty employee per 4 students. Put another way, there are now 3 times as many administrators and other professionals (not including university hospitals staff), as there are faculty (on a per student basis) at the leading schools in country."

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

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It's possible that there may be too many administrators at a university, but from my perspective after 20+ years in academia, one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits. I'd even make an analogy to increased malpractice insurance costs for doctors due to increasing number of lawsuits doctors face.

For example, there are more compliance costs around IRBs for human subjects, export controls of potentially sensitive data, companies we can't work with (e.g. in China), contracting with companies we can work with, intellectual property and startups, Title IX, discrimination, Federal funding do's and don'ts, cybersecurity requirements, travel to foreign countries (soon to be implemented), and a lot lot lot lot more. Also, like security, these things only ratchet upward, never down.

In the past, professors used to handle some of these things informally and part-time on top of their teaching and research, but it really has to be professionalized and be done full time because of risks and costs of getting it wrong.

Taking a step back, discussions about "too many admins" also feels not all that different from those threads on HN saying "I could build product XYZ in a weekend, why do they have so many employees?" Sure, but building the product isn't the hard part, it's sales, marketing, customer support, regulatory compliance, HR, data scientists, UX designers, and all the other functions needed to transform it from a product to a business.

As a fellow academic at a major research institution, I agree that the regulatory aspect (IRB, grant money auditing, etc) is a huge financial burden requiring many staff. This is not something that universities can easily reduce without loosening requirements at the Federal level

> one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits

I think this a gap that can be easily and fittingly addressed by explainable AI (XAI) hopefully with much cheaper cost using automation, reasoning and decision making with minimum number of expert staff in the loop for verification and validation.

I've got the feeling that Elon proposed DOGE as a trojan horse for doing this sneakily:

1) Reduced the budget to make govt more efficient so staff number reduction is inevitable

2) Sell and provide XAI based solutions for regulatory compliance, etc (accidentally his AI company name is xAI)

3) Repeat these with many govt's organization, research, academic institutions

4) Profit!

But apparently the US research universities like UPenn did not get the memo and cut the number of graduate research students instead of the admin staff.

I wouldn’t trust an LLM to do anything compliance related. Sounds like a recipe for a lawsuit

> cheaper cost using automation, reasoning and decision making with minimum number of expert staff in the loop for verification and validation.

Verification and validation of LLM output in this context would mean doing all the same research, training etc done today for human staff and then comparing the results line by line. It would actually take more time. How do you know if the LLM failed to apply one of hundreds of rules from a procedure unless you have a human trained on it who has also examined every relevant document and artifact from the process?

> one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits

As mentioned by the GP posts the main problem is the increasing rules, regulations and compliance need to be processed the admin staff not the research contributions itself (these invention and innovation parts are performed by the graduate students and professors who are getting cuts by the limited budget).

This AI based system will include (not limited to) LLM with RAG (with relevants documents) that can perform the work of the tens if not hundreds jobs of the admin staff. The agent AI can also include rule based expert system for assessment of the procedures. It will be much faster than human can ever be with the on-demand AWS scale scaling (pardon the pun).

Ultimately it will need only a few expert admin staff for the compliance validation and compliance instead tens of hundreds as typical now in research organizations. The AI based system will even get better over time due to this RLHF and expert human-in-the-loop arrangement.

> But apparently the US research universities like UPenn did not get the memo and cut the number of graduate research students instead of the admin staff.

If you reduce the number of staff, the people who are going to hurt first are the graduate researchers. I run my lab with a whole host of college and department staff who make all of our jobs easier. If you cut them, their jobs are going to fall to professors, and if they have to do more admin work, graduate teaching and research assistants are going to get more shit work, and also there's going to be fewer than them.

For instance we have a whole office that help us get our research funded. These people are "bureaucratic administrative overhead", but they make everyone's job easier by providing a centralized resource for this particular problem. Get rid of them an you can save millions of dollars in salaries, but you're going to lose more than that in lost contracts and professor/student productivity. This would mean students probably would get cut anyway, so they're making the smart move of supporting only the students they can, and not leaving anyone out to dry.

> If you cut them, their jobs are going to fall to professors

yes, then you hire more professors, instead of hiring more staff! Funny how people don't seem to realize the obvious.

I thought the purpose of this was to reduce waste. Firing a low cost administrator and replacing them with N highly-trained (and higher cost) Ph.D.s is not efficient use of taxpayer dollars.

The goal is to have more researchers that will do high impact research. You cannot do that if you take all the resources and spend on managers and administrative staff.

> The goal is to have more researchers that will do high impact research

Given that my comments are downvoted like crazy, I've got the feeling that the US university including the Professors (tenured) are missing the forest from the trees regarding this issue.

I once asked a senior and prominent US Professor regarding their multi-million dollars grant for single project that can be easily spent on multi-project with similar or higher impact in other countries. His answer was they have to spent a lot on students, and now I know the truth that most of the money are going to the research managers and admin staff, what as waste.

> they have to spent a lot on students

This is a good thing. It's expensive to support a Ph.D. student in America; it's a lot cheaper if you're in a country with lower cost of living. But as a researcher, you want to do research in an expensive area because it means you'll be around other smart people and lots of resources.

At the end of the day tho, despite all its flaws, this system is a winner; US produces the most research, is home to the best universities, and students from around the world dream of studying in America. We can make improvements, but the need for a rewrite of the system is greatly overstated. Other countries wish they had our problems.

> and now I know the truth that most of the money are going to the research managers and admin staff, what as waste.

Perhaps you forget or ignored to read the complete sentence.

> At the end of the day tho, despite all its flaws, this system is a winner; US produces the most research, is home to the best universities, and students from around the world dream of studying in America. We can make improvements, but the need for a rewrite of the system is greatly overstated. Other countries wish they had our problems

I admire your strange perspective on govt's money spending on research but let's be honest it's not sustainable with so much wastage on unnecessary overheads. Nothing last forever the, wastages and corruptions (wealth and morals) are the main reasons the richest of countries and empires falls (Egypt, Roman, Iranian Sassanids, Ottoman, British, Russian, Indian Moghul and Chinese Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing, etc).

> Perhaps you forget or ignored to read the complete sentence.

The rest of that sentence is not true though. Read this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43146300

How do you square that math with your assertion that "most of the money are going to the research managers and admin staff"? You can at least admit you are expressing very strong opinions here for someone who doesn't have a firm grasp on the issues and no relevant experience working in this area. You're not aware of the fractal of complexity in this area, and you boiled it down into a heuristic which is smugly wrong.

> not sustainable with so much wastage on unnecessary overheads.

You can't really articulate how these things are wasteful, so why are you concluding the overheads are unnecessary? See my sibling reply to the OP using the analogy of a skyscraper.

You are a person coming in the middle floor of the sky scraper saying "What are all these beams for? They seem unnecessary, let's get rid of them."

The engineers and architects who built the sky scraper told you those beams are holding up the roof.

You say "I know better, they are waste and unnecessary overhead!"

The engineers and architects point out towers of the past were much smaller. People expect towers today to be taller than ever before, and if you want taller buildings you need more and more support beams. Gutting the tower of support beams will cause it to collapse in short order.

We can talk about how to rearchitect the tower to use fewer beams overall, because that's a worthwhile discussion. But this approach of "slash all the waste!" is basically a game of Jenga, because you aren't sure what's actually waste and what's load bearing.

> the main reasons the richest of countries and empires falls...

The main reason empires fall is because people who have no experience building them take over and drive them into the ground with their own hubris and ignorance.

If that's the goal, firing the administrative staff will have exactly the opposite effect. Administrative staff and managers free researchers to do research. If administrative staff and managers are fired, researchers will be administrating and managing instead of researching.

Getting rid of administrators doesn't obviate the need to administrate. It has to be done, so we do it efficiently using shared resources, which brings economies of scale -- that efficiency Musk keeps talking about. What you're arguing for is increasing waste so everyone has less time to do critical work.

Here's an analogy:

To support the roof of a house, you need a few support beams. To support the roof of a skyscraper, you need many more support beams. You can't support the roof of a skyscraper with the number of support beams that support the roof of a house.

University research started as a house, but now it's a sky scraper. You're coming into the skyscraper saying there's too many beams, but you're judging by house standards. Maybe there are, but most of them were put there for good, well-considered reasons; as a layman you have no idea which are load bearing, so if you come knocking them down you endanger the whole tower. Which is a shame because it's gotten really really tall - taller than any other tower in history - so toppling it because you don't understand it would be a huge loss for everyone.

Compliance industry has gone from $0 to $90B in twenty years. It does not produce anything real, except lobbying for more compliance needing more compliance services, software and lawyers.

Here is a book about it:

https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...

I did work for a compliance as a service company 35 years ago. Customs brokers go back much farther than that. I’m very suspicious of the claim this whole industry didn’t exist 20 years ago, which makes me suspicious of the other claims.

I work at a public K-12 in IT. We were definitely doing compliance reporting 20 years ago. Compliance is pretty central to the IEP process created in 1975, but it goes back further than that.

We were cleaning out old cabinets that had been stored for many years. We found aggregated student data reports so old that my grandmother (still alive at 106) would have been among the headcount. 90 years ago we were doing compliance reports. The reports were very simple, but there were no computers to create them. They would have involved just as much time as we spend on today's reports only we have a hundred times the data in them.

> "I could build product XYZ in a weekend, why do they have so many employees?"

Unlike product XYZ*, there was a time in very recent history when these same schools ran successfully with much smaller administrations. At some point you have to ask - do you want to save the cancer, or the patient?

*I am humoring your hypothetical, but there are in fact many cases where a small team outperforms bloated, ossified companies, e.g. the Britten V1000 motorcycle, or the recent article about wedding planning software (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43133174), or the older article on the windows terminal (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27725133)

> there was a time in very recent history when these same schools ran successfully with much smaller administrations.

as the comment you're replying to has already stated:

> one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits. I'd even make an analogy to increased malpractice insurance costs for doctors due to increasing number of lawsuits doctors face. > For example, there are more compliance costs around IRBs for human subjects, export controls of potentially sensitive data, companies we can't work with (e.g. in China), contracting with companies we can work with, intellectual property and startups, Title IX, discrimination, Federal funding do's and don'ts, cybersecurity requirements, travel to foreign countries (soon to be implemented), and a lot lot lot lot more. Also, like security, these things only ratchet upward, never down.

First, I don't think we should take it as a given that all the admin. growth is just efficiently working on complying with regulations. And I'm pretty sure foreign countries, and travel to them, already existed in 1976. As did patents, contracts with other companies, and sanctions that US entities had to respect - remember, in 1976 there was the cold war.

Second and more importantly - these same schools ran successfully with much smaller administrations. The regulations you cite are not a law of nature - are universities or their bloated administrations lobbying to have this regulatory burden reduced or streamlined? It sure doesn't look like it.

Do you work in higher ed? It’s ok to admit that you weighed in on a topic you don’t understand, then bow out gracefully, since you’ve repeatedly been given accurate responses to your assertions.

More than half of the explanation for the administrative bloat since 1976 was blamed on factors that did not change much since the 1960s - with the notable exception of foreign sanctions, which were much worse due to the cold war. Also blamed were IRBs, which have been a requirement since 1974: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_subject_research_legisla...

The "accurate responses" were non-explanations. Like blaming being three hours late on a single red light.

You really don’t know what you’re talking about. Please stop.

Such assertions are a lot more persuasive if you can point to significant errors the poster has made.

> The "accurate responses" were non-explanations.

Could you give some hints as to what would constitute sufficient evidence to convince you?

Just looking in from the outside of this conversation,

> More than half of the explanation for the administrative bloat since 1976 was blamed on factors that did not change much since the 1960s - with the notable exception of foreign sanctions, which were much worse due to the cold war. Also blamed were IRBs, which have been a requirement since 1974: ...

Is it that those were just bad examples and the actual bulk of the work is coming in from elsewhere? Or is it the case that these areas were already in place, but have since come to demand additional work that they didn't before (for what reason?)? &c

Have you considered the other "half"? (note, the claim of "half" was from the person dismissing all the arguments).

Are you using 1976 as a baseline? Given this and your other comments in this thread, it seems like it. I'm sure the regulatory and compliance environment have changed significantly in the last 50 years. E.g. OSHA and other agencies have significantly increased the monitoring and procedures needed to run a chemistry research lab due to accidents and deaths.

The ancestor comment cited statistics on admin. growth from 1976 to 2018, that is why I mention 1976. Otherwise, your comment is very representative of the defenders of admin. bloat - a learned helplessness in simply assuming that all this busy-work must be serving some purpose, then pointing some example of superficially beneficial regulation.

But even if we grant that all the regulations are as crucial as chemistry lab safety, that doesn't explain the bloat:

regulatory compliance comprises 3 to 11% of schools’ nonhospital operating expenses, taking up 4 to 15% of faculty and staff’s time. - https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...

This answer eliminates the “regulations are the reason” counterclaim

It is just funny how technology was supposed to help society become less bureaucratic, but it has done just the opposite. Now to do anything, you need a bunch of administrators that will manage the systems that one needs to be "more efficient"!

Most IRB's further outsource to consulting firms and blindly do what the consultants tell them to do (not included in head counts). That is just to say the administrative people added are just trained to follow expensive rules and lack any domain knowledge whatsoever.

> there was a time in very recent history when these same schools ran successfully with much smaller administrations.

> there are in fact many cases where a small team outperforms bloated, ossified companies...

Sounds like the perfect time to start a disruptive university program! Where's Andrew Carnegie when you need him? Any relevant examples in this space?

>In place of large, on-campus administrative bureaucracies, UATX plans to make administration remote, outsourcing positions abroad. Not only will this arrangement save university funds, Howland noted, but it would also pay foreign workers livable, US-level wages. Further, the school will forgo—along with competitive varsity sports—what he called “club-med amenities”: climbing gyms, student recreation centers with ball pits and golf simulators, napping stations, private pools, and the like. UAustin has even rethought the principle of reserving classroom space for each academic department—at UATX, departments will have control over their budgets and bid for classrooms in a market. The money saved by this and other initiatives, Howland said, will go towards instruction.

https://dartreview.com/a-radically-different-model-of-americ...

It's interesting, but not the kind of thing I'd expect to disrupt much. Looking into the details a little more, this place has a long ways to go before it lives up to those claims. Far from doing away with administrative bureaucracies, the academic catalog currently lists roughly as many administrators as faculty.

In boasting it won't have "club-med amenities" you might expect it to be cheaper than typical schools, but the tuition is $30k, and the total cost to attend is almost $60k! You can go to state college for less than that and they have an order magnitude more classes to take. Not to mention climbing walls.

Good luck getting accredited so your students are eligible for federal student loans. Who effectively accredits universities? Other universities, indirectly. It is a cartel.

I remember reading interesting things recently about Arizona State University and the "New American University" model - https://nadia.xyz/asu is a nice summary

The numbers in the post that you respond to are picturing a different situation: there are almost 3 admins per professor. That means the universities are not teaching places, but administrative places with some teaching as a secondary activity.

I think people overcomplicated universities and that is what makes admins needed. Taking a step back, we need to make universities teaching places again, with 1 admin for 3 professors, not the other way around. Imagine savings, needing less grant money, less audits, less funding that comes with strings attached.

In the end I think people make up too much irrelevant work. And that needs to go away.

do you think this is parallel to the growth of "you MUST attend university" mindset?

A more relevant metric than admins/professor would be admin staff/scientific staff. Given that a research group under a professor will probably contain numerous associate professors, assistant professors, postdocs, PhDs, and research assistants who all generate some admin workload, 3 admins per professor does not sound outlandish.

I'm not sure what the person meant in the comment you're replying to, but it sounds like in your comment you're reading "professor" as "full professor", which is not how I'd read it. I'd read it as basically "faculty member".

Postdocs, PhD students, and RA's are not faculty either.

Universities became complicated because it is now a business. If you have a business, you need to complicate it to justify higher prices over time.

You are misinterpreting what’s going on. Universities are places where lots of people live and work. There’s support staff for all of that. Some activity that goes on is teaching. Some is research. Some is community engagement and outreach. All of those functions also need support staff, particularly research. At many large universities, research is the primary function, not teaching. Research requires a lot more support staff than teaching.

I think I am not misinterpreting. I expect an university to do teaching and focus on teaching (including some research). I expect any auxiliary activity to be minimized as much as possible, from cafeteria workers and campus electricians to HR and accounting.

An airline has three times more aircraft mechanics than aircraft pilots. Would you say this operation is an aircraft repair and maintenance shop that happens to do some airplane flying on the side?

But historically universities DID deliver the same product in a weekend. It really feels lika a lot of the extra admin burden was generated itnernally and self-imposed. Each piece of DEI is small and well-meaning, and now we have these massive institutions that have to cut PhD students of all things to balance the books.

A major source of administrative and non-teaching staff is that many universities have added things like 'a hostpital' on the side. This is reasonable when you're running a med school with a research component: you need patients to work on, after all. The hospital provides a high standard of care to the community that it serves, and creates both revenue and costs, far in excess of any DEI program.

Not challenging your point, just also pointing out that this scenario was already factored in (i.e. hospital admin not included) when calculating the initial ratios.

Bureaucracies are masters at creating work that justifies their own existence and growth.

>Sure, but building the product isn't the hard part, it's sales, marketing, customer support, regulatory compliance, HR, data scientists, UX designers, and all the other functions needed to transform it from a product to a business.

Most of those are not needed or are needed in drastically lower quantities. UX designers in many companies are very obviously just redesigning things for the sake of justifying their salaries.

In Dan Simmons' novel "Hyperion," one of the characters describes a government agency that both builds monuments and provides medical care to children. When faced with budget cuts, they reduce the medical care while continuing to build monuments, because monuments are visible evidence of their work while the absence of medical care only shows up in statistics.

The administrators are the school at this point, why would they choose to cut there?

I recently saw a term for this -- "hostage puppy", which I think is an excellent description. I think [1] is the original source for the definition.

[1] https://x.com/perrymetzger/status/1887896797575520673

Oof the US team I work for is beholden to a foreign HQ that runs the hostage puppy play, great term.

Here's a literal "hostage puppy" that was quite the rage in 1973 (though National Lampoon didn't use that phrase): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lampoon_%28magazine%2...

The literal worst thing Penn could do for students at this point is to take more on they aren't sure they will be able to support through their Ph.D. They are protecting and looking our for the students they have by not accepting more.

this is the same reason wealthy donors want a building with their name on it, but don't want to fund the janitors who will keep it clean.

The author of that article is acting as though there were only two types of employees at a university: faculty and administrative. Yet this is false, faculty are "team leaders" managing a team of scientific staff (non-faculty). Typically (besides PhD students) postdocs and research scientists.

For instance, one university has:

- faculty 6% (the actual professors and associate professors running things)

- postdocs 9% (faculty/staff scientist aspirants with a PhD)

- research staff 25% (e.g. research engineer, research scientist)

- other academic staff 12% (I imagine, technicians)

- admin staff 28%

So, while faculty is only 6% of the overall workforce, scientific employees still make up 52% of the lot. Add to that the PhD students who are not counted as employees in the US despite being paid and having employee duties towards their superior (a member of faculty). This same university has about 40% of the number of employees worth of graduate students (7k to the 17k), for instance.

In conclusion, what the statistics you report show, is rather how precarious research has become. There existed no such thing as a postdoc in the 70s; my advisor's advisor, who was recruited in that decade, had already signed a contract for tenured employment before his PhD was even over, as did many of his peers. Nowadays, it's typical to postdoc for a minimum of 3 years, and then play the odds, which are not in the candidate's favour as the 6% faculty to 9% postdoc hints at.

If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers. This is basically the same situation.

Administrators usually exist for specific reasons. As long as those reasons remain, it's difficult to cut administrators. If there are regulations governing what the university is allowed to do with federal money, the university needs administrators to ensure and report compliance. If students expect that the university will provide accommodation, the university needs enough staff to run a small city and all associated services.

> If there are regulations governing what the university is allowed to do with federal money, the university needs administrators to ensure and report compliance

I have a friend who’s a fairly established scientist in his field. The promised cuts to NIH indirect funding would have exactly the effect you’re describing by requiring them to spend time calculating everything as direct costs for every shared resource precisely enough to survive an audit. Trying to save money there will cost more than it’s worth because most of the shared people, equipment, and resources are paid for by NIH but they’d have to add accounting staff to document which fraction gets billed to which grant at that level of precision.

> If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers.

In my experience, they'll try find literally anyone else they can before laying off engineers. Both times I've been a part of it was like 10-20% of laid off employees were engineering. 80-90% recruiting, support, admin, HR, middle management, design, etc, etc. As much as possible leave sales, marketing, engineering functions alone.

For a tech company, sales and marketing are admin staff. Professors are to universities what engineers are to a tech company

> If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers. This is basically the same situation.

Eh, maybe. Part of me thinks this is making a spectacle out of having to tighten up the finances.

I’m reminded of when I was in school many years ago at a state university. The state called for a 2% budget cut. Or in other words, going back to what the budget was a year or two prior. The administration went on and on about how there was absolutely no fat to cut and started making loud public statements about how they would “need” to do ridiculous things like cut the number of offered sections for undergrad mathematics courses by 15%, eliminate the music department, etc. They whipped the students into a frenzy and the whole thing culminated with a protest march down to the capitol building, and the state relented.

A nominal 2% budget cut is a 5-6% real cut, assuming average wage growth and inflation. And if that cut meant going back to where the budget was 1-2 years earlier, the university had already faced effective budget cuts over those years.

You’re missing the bigger point, that the cuts they proposed in response were far beyond what would be necessary for such a small budget cut. To say nothing of the fact that they immediately jumped to making highly disruptive cuts (like an entire department) instead of even considering things like cutting admin roles or creature comforts (which had grown like crazy in the years prior) first.

>If students expect that the university will provide accommodation, the university needs enough staff to run a small city and all associated services.

No doubt you need admin to help accommodate students learning needs but I've come around to thinking that they should change the parameters around testing and give every student the opportunity to use "accommodations" rather than making them prove their disability. Everyone is being granted the same degree, if a significant number of the students in your program need accommodations, like extra time on the exam, why not grant it to everybody who asks? Or better yet, just give everyone the time they need. It seems silly to me that you need to prove your need before you can get things like extra time - I think it should be opened up to everybody

[flagged]

Then how did the universities operate before the increases? How come digitalization is not able to reduce the admin numbers. You are the one to justify why you need this additional overhead and not the other way around.

They didn’t used to have to deal with FAR and DFARS compliance, export compliance, cybersecurity, iEdison reporting, and so on. Nevertheless, the administrative component of F&A indirects has been capped at 26% for years. The universities have to fill the budget gap with other funds (and no, not tuition, that is not used for the research enterprise).

This is exactly it. A modern university has needs that are far greater and demanding than one of 50+ years ago. And generally, the people doing the ground-level work are underpaid and overworked. If anything, there may be a glut of VP and C-level positions, but they don’t make up the bulk of employees.

In addition to what the other commenter said, most of the public universities doing scientific research used to be far better funded from their states than they are today on a cost-per-student basis. Additional administrative staff that many universities now have is often necessitated by their regulatory complexity as well as the need for generating different sources of funding. These are broad statements that do oversimplify matters, but part of the full story.

Why would digitization reduce the number of university admins? I'm sure there were some clerks and secretaries whose jobs were automated, but the universities also had to add huge IT departments. Plus, everything about a university is more complicated now then in was 50 years ago. In 1970, Harvard had 6000 applicants for 1200 freshman spots. Today it has 54,000 for 1900 spots. I'm sure the percentage that are international is vastly higher now. Probably a higher percentage want to visit campus. Financial aid is a lot more complicated. So just the admissions office is doing much more work.

> In 1970, Harvard had 6000 applicants for 1200 freshman spots. Today it has 54,000 for 1900 spots.

Why not sort descending by SAT score and call it a day? Evaluating things like extracurriculars continues to be classist bullshit and is probably responsible for making acceptance criteria "complicated".

Because SAT scores, alone, tell you nothing about a candidate outside of their ability to completely that test.

By this metric I would have got into any school I wanted, but that’s just because I put an exceptional amount of effort into preparing for the test. My grades and extracurriculars weren’t top-notch. I did go to an elite-ish school and it was clear that many other students deserved to be there more than me (ie. were able to contribute to society more in various ways), and in my view that difference was legible in the admissions process.

Alternatively, why have they not expanded the number of available seats with the more than adequate resources available?

Because when it comes to Harvard, out of 54,000 applications you'll have at least 1900 perfect SAT scores. Then how do you decide who to admit? You still need some process.

> Then how did the universities operate before the increases?

Easily. Every additional rule and regulation has a compliance cost, we've added far too many rules and regulations.

The EO in question literally just reduces the amount that can be spent on overhead. Maybe they should try reducing overhead?

"Overhead" here is things like physical plant and shared resources.

because most of that overhead isn't removable. all of your chemistry/biology/physics research has labs and lab managers as overhead. that is intrinsically expensive.

So why not just use the endowment, why does the tax payer need to fund this? 22.3 Billion isn't enough?

They are using their endowment. They spend around 4-5% of it each year.

I had one professor at college who remarked on how all of the parking garages on campus used to be parking lots 30 years ago, and are equally full today that they were back then. The student and faculty population hasn't changed over that time, but the growth of administration was explosive.

I don't entirely know how much of this is attributable to each part, but my suggestions are that these administrators are driven by:

1. Increases in student services (ie sports)

2. Laws and regulations, like Title IX

3. Increased bureaucracy around government grants and research funding

4. Huge endowments that need managers

Those 4 aren't really adding much overhead.

For instance, I can tell you right now with certainty that at any large university the number of software devs or database admins in the IT department far outpace the number of financial analysts working in foundation/endowment. Pick any large university at random, and I'll wager that without even knowing the spread.

But here's the thing, universities need IT divisions. They also need the other large operations level bureaucracies they typically have put in place. Facilities and plant, university police, housing, etc etc. You can't pull off a large university without these divisions nowadays. So saying, "Oh we can cut them" is very shortsighted.

I worked at a large public university. The University had a large central IT team, but each college had its own independent IT team that managed their own computers, network, printers, and other technology. Each also had their own software dev teams and there was significant overlap an inefficiencies in this model.

Not every university is set up this way, and it’s not necessarily as inefficient as you think, since different colleges have different needs.

Yeah it’s easy to think centralizing IT will deliver a lot of efficiencies, but you pay the price in reduced agility on the ground.

The best balance I’ve seen involves centralizing a small number of essential services, ideally ones with lots of compliance and security complexity. Manage that well in one place, then let the departments use that infrastructure to meet their unique needs.

When I get in front of a classroom and my tech isn't working, I call a number and they dispatch campus IT immediately to my location to fix it within 5 minutes. This kind of rapid response and support isn't possible for a department to fund, especially if it's a department like History.

Face it - students have higher expectations now, professors also have higher expectations. This requires administrative staff to run. Back in the day school budgets were lower, but even when I went to college in 2005 they didn't have campus-wide wifi in every classroom. We had one professor who taught with powerpoint. Today, every student has a laptop in class.

Maintaining a modern campus takes a big IT department and centralizing it is the least wasteful way to do things.

I was at a uni with departmental IT and I certainly could do that, I knew the 3-4 IT people by name and I could just message them and get whoever was on campus at the time to help me immediately if it was urgent.

There are things better done by a central IT team like university level WiFi, but you can make that smaller and also have departmental teams for things where more agility is needed. If the people are competent it's really great.

And yes 3-4 people only makes sense because it was a large department, but smaller departments with similar mandates, for example English/Literature and History, just have a shared departmental IT between them.

Large public universities with 50k students are essentially running small cities and have to provide and maintain facilities for a city of that size ( utilities, policing, housing, facility and infrastructure maintenance)

May I suggest a fifth possibility: your core assumption is flawed and your professor hasn’t been paying attention.

Unless your college is failing, it is hard to believe that the student population hasn’t changed significantly over the last 30 years, when the US population has almost grown by 30%.

I attended UCI over 25 years ago. The student population has since more than doubled. Tuition rates, interestingly have also almost doubled.

This was at a college where indeed the student population did not change in size. The same goes for the professors, whose population grew about 5% over that time.

Not every school wants to grow the size of their student body. And there shouldn't be any reason why they would be forced to.

That's a weird thing to say since many small and rather well regarded private schools stay small on purpose.

For example, do you really think Dartmouth is failing?

Yeah, the parent comment here should have been thinking Dartmouth rather than about one of the UCs for their model school. This was Caltech.

Well, as a fellow alum, I can tell you they definitely screwed up the last two points (esp ITAR) within living memory.

Yeah, the list I provided there were areas where Caltech grew significantly. I wasn't sure if other schools were the same.

Many elite colleges have opted to keep class sizes small, and make themselves more selective instead. It is pretty despicable. It sounds like UCI is doing the right thing, although I've heard it's still hard to get into many of the UC schools because there are so many applicants.

In fairness, a dollar in 2000 is worth $1.83 today, so that would (almost) account for the tuition increase.

I think its likely students having more money and therefore a car plus there being more students overall. Tons of colleges now most students have a car and parking pass even if they live 3 blocks off campus.

Student car ownership also didn't account for the explosive growth of parking at this school. The ratio of cars per student surely grew a little bit since the 1990's, but not nearly that much.

When I was a kid my mom dropped my dad off for his college classes. When I went to school I took my car. We should micromanage college administration from the outside because of that.

If the lot and garage were full, it's impossible to know what unserved population was taking the bus in either era. Let alone many other statistical questions here...

>It's pretty telling that schools like Penn don't cut their administrators, but instead they cut their admissions.

Ye olde Sowell quote[1] about institutional priorities and budget cuts seems highly appropriate here.

[1] https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/03/thomas_sowell_budge...

Incredible.

I encourage anyone taking this line of criticism to compare an e.g. $5B state university to any other similar sized enterprise, and consider what increased operational and administrative costs those other organizations have had to undertake since 1976. This can include HR and IT and healthcare, legal liability and industry compliance. Now add to that the additional regulatory burdens specific to higher education, and the increased market expectations of higher education as a holistic 'experience' that is almost unrecognizable from what it was 50 years ago.

Much of that professional staff is geared toward corporate-style product development and marketing, because they've been forced to by a lack of public funding. And while a commercial corporation generally aims to retain and grow a customer base, gaining some economy of scale for those professional positions, universities are functionally capped at those small ratios you describe.

Of course there is administrative bloat, and the funding model doesn't do enough to self-regulate that, but lack of public investment causes more systemic inefficiencies than that.

> Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment which grew by 78%.

There’s a separate factor at play here: colleges are increasingly using people who are not full-time tenured professors to teach classes. See, for example: https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-exp...

Nobody would fire themselves or their close friends/colleagues. But they would also want less work and delegate responsibilities. So if left alone, admins would have all the incentive to hire more reports and try to cut cost elsewhere instead of themselves, which lead to reduced revenue and bloated institutions.

It is a vicious feedback loop.

Who do you think advises students getting into classes, who do you think reviews applications or works with companies to get students jobs. There is administrative over head because these activities are not core competencies of researchers.

People act like a reseach faculty member should be conducting cutting edge research while writing findings applying from Grant's advising students on course course offerings and courting employers while also snoozing with alumni for donations.

Noone can do it all and thus there are specialist in these fields that usually cost a fraction of what a faculty member costs.

At many schools, advising is a professorial responsibility. Professors have a hard job, but they have a job that is very powerful and prestigious and can be incredibly lucrative (thanks to consulting gigs, patents, etc.).

...subsidized housing, normalized sabbaticals, teaching a course that uses the textbook you yourself wrote...

I’m happy to accept a job where my housing is subsidized. What university is this?

I recall that universities in extremely expensive places like UCLA, Stanford etc subsidize housing and/or provide specially priced housing for staff and faculty. Not to say they are cheap, they are just tolerable given the salaries, which is more than you can say with regular market pricing.

Stanford does have faculty housing: it's made available for the tenured faculty member to rent for life. The school owns the house. The professor builds no equity.

The alternative, given the cost of housing near Stanford and faculty salaries, would be for faculty to live over an hour distant. The university acknowledges the benefit of having faculty live nearby, and also recovers the rent money and keeps the property.

And yet, a lot of Stanford's faculty live right next to campus. It turns out all those startup board seats are lucrative enough that they can actually afford a house in the local area.

1. Those universities subsidize housing because the salaries that they offer would otherwise attract zero candidates due to the local cost of living.

2. It is usually the case that the university then owns a share of the equity in your house, and is owed a share of the profits when you sell.

Indeed, a large portion of a professor's duties are administrative.

None of the above has changed materially over the past few decades.

This may be a side issue, but is a pet peeve of mine. Penn is a private university.

I'm a staunch supporter of higher education, but I think it's worth observing that the public university and college system educates people at a much lower cost. The huge cost disparity between private and public college challenges most simplistic explanations.

I'm drawn to the parallels between our "private" universities and our "private" health care system. Both face almost exactly the same criticism of costing twice as much while imposing barriers to access.

I don't think improving higher education is the present government's intention, but if it were my intention, I'd focus on supporting our public universities, colleges, community colleges, and trade schools. Both of my kids graduated from public colleges, debt free.

It’s also revealing the way this move is being marketed by universities. This certainly isn’t the first time HHS has raised concerns about the magnitude of indirect costs. Obama’s HHS also tried to reduce indirect costs: https://archive.ph/2025.01.09-171418/https://www.bostonglobe...

There's nothing revealing about it. The article you posted talks about capping things around 40 or 50%, or 95% of current funding. Not 15%, which will bankrupt those schools.

It's an example of how you can take something that's true, put it out of context, and be completely wrong.

The 40-50% isn’t what the Obama administration proposed. The article says the administration didn’t propose a specific number. The point is that there’s clearly a problem here that isn’t something Trump is making up.

One of the common moves I’ve seen with Trump and particularly his defenders is to take an issue that’s real, then convert it into a weapon. So imagine my dog is overweight and needs to go on a bit of a diet: well, what if we took that same dog and reduced its calorie intake by 75% until it starved to death. Then while I’m standing over the corpse, I explain to you that “this isn’t something I was making up, there was a real problem there.”

Even if, against all odds, you really are in favor of reforming things, killing a bunch of dogs pretty much guarantees a good-faith conversation can never happen. At some point you just need to decide if you’re on the side of truth or bullshit.

That’s just a roundabout way of saying you disagree with us about how to solve the issue, and assign a different relative valuation to the outcome where the process-oriented careful approach fails to achieve any change. You’re welcome to do that, but that’s just living in a democracy.

E.g. Obama promised sunlight and reforming the intelligence community. But in the end he didn’t do anything because he trusted the institutions and processes too much. So we voted for Tulsi to take a chain saw to the CIA.

Tulsi is an ideological tool of BJP/RSS/VHP. Who knows how many people she is going to pawn the family jewels to.

Tulsi is America First, just like BJP is India First. That makes her a natural antagonist of Liberal Internationalism and Islamic Global Socialism. But I have seen no evidence to make me doubt her fierce nationalistic loyalty to the U.S.

I see radical Islamic terrorism (TM) wasn’t marked down at cliché Walmart so you stopped by the mix and match barrel next to the DVDs on the way out. Maybe rootless cosmopolitanism will be on sale next time since its trademark expired along with Mickey Mouse’s.

Did I hallucinate that islamic socialism that was a boot on Bangladesh’s neck for decades? Islamic socialism was the dominant ideology in the islamic world among the elites, and still is among the diaspora. It’s real—it has a wikipedia page!

Regardless, I wasn’t using the term as a pejorative. What Islam, socialism, and liberal internationalism have in common is that they’re inherently cross-national, universal ideologies. That puts them in conflict with strong nationalism.

Tulsi is an american nationalist. For example she was okay with Assad, because she (correctly) felt Assad wasn’t a threat to america, was keeping a lid on Al Qaeda, and didn’t care about “human rights” in Syria. That view is just american nationalism. But it pisses off liberal internationalists and muslim socialists. Because their own outlook is universalizing, they assume her support for keeping Assad in place must indicate support for Assad’s policies and ideas.

> So we voted for Tulsi to take a chain saw to the CIA.

If "we" means "the minority MAGA base", then sure. But Gabbard has never been popular. Her favorability is at -13.7 in the RCP average [1], was never above water even during the heat of the campaign, and is at about -20 now.

[1]: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/tulsi_gabbard...

Tulsi is #8 and #9 on Trump's platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. She was featured prominently in the campaign, along with Elon and RFK Jr.: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-returns-t.... Traditional conservatives might not like her, but they knew full-well that she was part of the bargain.

That's just how political parties work! No single faction needs to carry a majority--but everyone votes together fully aware of what the platform is. And Trump kept his promises to his coalition partners and appointed both Tulsi and RFK Jr., and John Thune of all people busted his ass to get her confirmed. (Democrats should try this approach.)

The DNI doesn't run the CIA. In fact, between the CIA director and the DNI, it's rather the other way around. I don't know what the heck that has to do with a discussion of indirect costs, but I'm bored and didn't want to let that weird claim stand.

Fair point.

Everything that isn't PIs and grad students is funded out of admin, including all the lab techs.

Computer clusters, chem or bio lab gear, staff and techs, …. Some of this isn’t cheap and it’s not safe to let the grad students and p-docs do it. And somebody has to TA all those pre-xx and other mid to advanced course students.

Lab techs are often classified as “administrative and professional” employees by university HR but on NIH grants they would be paid for as a direct cost, other personnel (B on the R&R budget form).

I think “core” facilites can be handled a bit differently.

There are certainly NIH mechanisms for supporting them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them are partially supported—-or at least backstopped—-by indirects…

Yes, this is so. Ideally, you’d see a mix of direct support (e.g., a core as part of a large site grant like a U54) for things that advance the state of the art and indirect support for core activities supporting other investigators. Institutions vary how they manage core facilities as cost centers, what level they’re administered at (unit or uni-wide).

That isn’t true. Research staff is funded via grants almost exclusively, in computer science. I’m not sure about the sciences, but I would assume they would have a lot of labs that are not set up for education and would be funded mostly by grants.

Well, I'm the parent of a biochemistry lab tech currently selecting Phd project admits, but, I don't know, maybe my kid is making up that he's paid out of admin.

Or he could just be honestly wrong.

Just because some lab techs are admin doesn’t mean they all are.

This sounds like maybe this is an undergrad student? There's something called REU (Research Experience for Undergrads) that is issued in general to a university and then the university administers it to undergrads. But it is still a grant. Here's an example by the National Science Foundation: https://www.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives/reu

Nope. It's just a full-time job. He's even in the state pension system for it. He graduated a couple years ago.

/shrug

thanks for correcting me.

This is true in physics and geo as well.

Um, I'm not a fan of bloated university employment structures, but 1976 and 2018? Respectfully, you're comparing apples and oranges.

On the campuses of today's major universities there are entire support divisions. Housing, Facilities and Plant, Foundation, and on and on. And all that is before we even get to the big new divisions to come online on campuses since 1976. ie - University Police and IT divisions. These divisions collectively employ thousands of people at a typical university. In fact, at most universities, the ratio of employees in the bureaucracies to academic staff is roughly between 15:1 and 20:1.

If we want to cut that appreciably, you have to take a hatchet to the biggest divisions. (For most universities that will be IT.) Which is exactly what some universities have done. For example, the University of Wisconsin got that ratio down to roughly 8:1 at one point. But there were still a whole lot of database admins over at UW DoIT.

Point being, when people say "administrators", they're talking about the flood of IT guys, facilities planners, and project managers hired long after 1976. Most universities are far more lean on deans than they are on software developers or database admins for instance. So it's not at all clear how to get rid of an appreciable number of these people and still have a functioning UCLA just as an example.

And here's the bad news, I've only mentioned a few of the operations level bureaucracies required to pull off something like the University of Texas, or University of Michigan, or University of Wisconsin. Or even Penn for that matter. It's not as easy a problem to solve as people make it out to be.

Wait, why is University police so historically recent?

Cleary Act

Not really.

At the biggest universities, police pre-date that law.

The reason is obvious when you consider how large many universities have become. If you throw 50000 20 year olds into a 3 square mile area, there's likely to be a lot of crime that happens. Sexual assaults, narcotics, and thefts mostly. There are, of course, more serious crimes that happen as well. In all that chaos, these universities have an obligation to keep order.

Universities have more administrators and “other professionals” because they provide more services. There was only a very small IT department in the 70s. Student support services were minimal. This is not a good statistic without more context.

Are adjuncts counted as faculty? We were not when I was one. This could just be a classification problem.

I might go even further and suggest that the problem is trying to figure out how a university works by counting job titles.

My university only has 6% faculty, but 52% scientific staff overall, not counting graduate students. I do believe this is a classification issue coupled with the appearance and now ubiquity of precarious positions (soft-funded staff, postdocs).

> telling that schools like Penn don't cut their administrators, but instead they cut their admissions

Administrators are typically paid out of tuition. Penn is cutting uses in line with sources.

I am assuming some grant overheads also go to admin.

I get that, but a research university's prestige comes from the recognition for the research they do. Accepting fewer grad students means less research will be done and fewer papers will be published.

They could presumably cut admin staff to some extent, and pay grad students out of the tuition funds freed up. But why would we expect the bosses to fire their friends?

This is a complicated ecosystem, it's not that simple. Academic departments are not places where there's a lot of slack - positions are scarce, the competition for them is fierce, and the people who get them are notorious workaholics. Cutting admin means more work on professors, means less research output, means fewer grants funded, means fewer grad students supported. So you can cut students and get fewer students, or cut admin still get fewer students but also less research and funding as well.

Is it possible to do all three at the same time?

- talk about academic "administrators"

- lazily generalize

- be intellectually honest

The answers you are seeking require reading at least a whole book of information!

Every medieval fantasy movie you ever saw, who were the extras? The people in the castle stay because there's only ever a few positions in the castle. By definition there can only be a few, otherwise you are not a castle person.

I don't know if this equilibrium is natural or not since it's been the paradigm for centuries across a lot of life. I'm describing deep entitlement, the pure raw form of it.

Graduate students are paid to attend - they're more like employees than undergraduate students. Why wouldn't a university faced with funding cuts start by not hiring additional people rather than getting rid of current ones?

Maybe because graduate students directly contribute to the university’s mission by teaching undergrads and “producing” research (both of which bring in $$$), while administrators seem to be purely a cost center, many of whom serve no useful purpose?

I mean, the grants that are being cut is the money that graduate students bring in. Less grant money -> fewer graduate students. In theory maybe it's possible to be more efficient like you're suggesting, but it's hard to see how the immediate response could be any different.

It's way way way easier to freeze hiring (akin to admissions) than to go through a layoff. Not saying admin salaries are justified but gutting staff has much more fallout than fewer admissions.

But why don’t they? Does anyone know what all these administrators do?

I’ve heard the theory that more regulation leads to more admin needs but I don’t think higher education has been increasingly regulated for decades.

The common argument is that universities offer vastly more services to their students then in the past. Career centers, for example, are relatively new trend. This is in part because students also 'shop' for universities with the best perks - not necessarily the best faculty. The most egregious examples include Michelin star chefs, lazy Rivers, and very fancy scoreboards in their very fancy stadiums. Less egregious examples include better campus security and health support staff. As much as it's convenient to point to administrators as a problem, part of the problem is also the ongoing arms race to attract applicants and students' expectations.

A Unitarian system might be better, faculty run classes maybe without even TAs, your grade is however you do on your final, Spartan campuses without student amenities. The kids would be more depended on themselves to sink or flourish, but it’s almost like that anyways.

But if I had to choose for my own kid and had the money to afford it, I would still go with the full campus experience, although a Unitarian experience would probably be better for access overall.

The unitarian model you mentioned is the norm in Germany and France (and even the UK to a certain extent - a CSU will have better student amenities than Oxbridge tbh).

There are also more federal regulations that universities need to comply with and that drives up the number of administrators.

I think part of the problem is that universities have lots of people who do one job and that job is not everyday. For instance, where I'm at we have two people in charge of summer enrollment. That seems to be it. They are way way overworked for about two weeks at beginning of the summer. I have no idea what they do the other 50 weeks of the year. I think their boss is happy as long as they deal with summer courses.

“I have no idea what these other people I don’t work with do, so it must be nothing” is a really naive and insulting thing to say. They probably don’t know what you do either, would it be fair to say you do nothing of value?

Does anyone know what all these administrators do?

Yes. You don't. But other people do.

I don’t think higher education has been increasingly regulated for decades

Every industry has. Education more than most.

>Yes. You don't. But other people do.

This assertion is so much more compelling than a couple of examples would have been

There are thousands of different jobs they could have. You can’t think of any work that might happen at a university?

Ok, I’ll bite. My university has a team of experts to help students with academic writing. Another that helps us figure out how best to organize our classes in the online LMS that we use for distance education, and to ensure that we all are following a similar structure so as to not drive our students insane. Another team that helps support grad students on visas with logistics around immigration law and what-not. We have an office that helps with patents and technology transfer. Another team that helps with data repositories and management plans. We have a whole research computing office that runs our hpc team and deals with random IT things that scientists are always thinking up. Another that runs our IRB and helps us with that whole process. Another that helps us handle data use agreements so we can share data between institutions while staying compliant with relevant laws and what-not. We have an office that deals with contracts and legal agreements so I don’t have to figure out whether a certain clause in a funding agreement makes sense or not. And we have a whole team that helps me with budgets and financial analysis of my grants and research projects to make sure that my staff don’t suddenly find themselves unemployed in the middle of a grant year because I overspent or didn’t understand that certain kinds of expenses weren’t allowed. This is just off the top of my head and includes who I’ve worked with in the last month or two; I didn’t even get into the animal techs, the facilities folks, etc etc.

These are all people who are at extreme risk of losing their jobs in the next weeks and months because of the chaos happening with NIH funding, and I can say with certainty that I as a scientist and an educator am far more effective because I have these professionals working with me. This is what our indirects cover and it is absolutely crucial.

Admin Support for distance education and foreign students would scale with growth of the number of students. And somehow admin growth rate is double the growth rate of student body.

The rest of your examples explain why: regulation and maybe some unnecessary activities? I do not know who you are but seriously: do you need “a whole team” for your budget needs? How big is your budget? In my previous financial analyst role I (i.e one person) supported the accounting and financial needs for about 30 people (5 different teams, total spend including salaries, outside contracts and travel about $15 million/year). All that done in Excel and with plenty of time to spare. My wife is a part time accountant and she supports about 10 consultants with all their accounting needs: payroll, sending and tracking invoices, taxes (federal + state+city), cash reconciliation, etc…

The teams I mentioned all support dozens of investigators and their associated labs, they are shared resources. That’s part of the point of centralizing overhead costs at the university level via an indirect cost mechanism- if every lab had to do all of that we’d be wasting tons of money and time, but by centralizing it we get economies of scale. Tragically, my own lab’s budget is nowhere near the level that I could support enough financial help on my own… ;-)

And yes, many of the examples I listed are there for regulatory reasons, and that’s a good thing. We have laws around IRBs for good reasons, and it’s very important to have professional support in making sure we are doing things the right way in that regard. Data use agreements are important- when subjects share their personal data with me so I can study it, they do so with the understanding that it will be handled properly and part of how we do that is via data use agreements, and we need professionals to help with that because I certainly didn’t learn enough about contract law in grad school to do a good job with it on my own.

There is obviously a conversation to be had about whether a particular regulation is appropriate or whether there’s too much of this or that red tape, and I think every scientist would be able to tell stories of administrative annoyance. But it’s absurd to argue that the solution is to burn it all down indiscriminately, which is what we’re seeing.

The thing though, is that they actually are unnecessary.

We don't have these guys here in Sweden, and our university education costs less per head than highschool education. The Russians don't have these guys, and they even have the Indepedent University of Moscow, which is basically a bunch of mathematicians that let anybody who passes three of their courses take the rest and get a degree.

This whole thing where both they and we and some other people let anybody who does well enough on the exams in is also very important, because it means that you aren't forced to jump through hoops to get accepted, and this signals something to people-- that university education isn't about hoop jumping or about satisfying political criteria, and this signals something about the attitude of the state to its citizens which is really important at least to me.

Sure, but this is the US we're talking about, and the regulatory environment is of course different in the US than in Sweden or Russia.

You can argue that the US's regulations are dumb and shouldn't exist, but that doesn't change the fact that they do exist, and that universities need to retain staff that can ensure compliance.

I don't know if the huge amount of admin jobs at US universities today is actually necessary, but it's plausible that universities in one country might need more admin staff than universities in another.

Just because you don’t know doesn’t mean it’s just a bunch of lazy jerks collecting paychecks for doing nothing. You clearly don’t know anything about the state of higher ed regulation if you think nothing has changed in the last few decades. FERPA, HIPAA, Title IX, a huge IT infrastructure and all the security concerns that go with that, the ADA…

“Students” might also be the wrong denominator for research-intensive places.

Penn has an army of postdocs and research staff too. Even though they aren’t paid out of indirects, they do need to get paid, have places to park, get safety training, etc, all of which do need admins.

> I don’t think higher education has been increasingly regulated for decades.

Because things never made headlines and you never paid attention.

Maybe talk to a professor or an administrator, or ask ChatGPT before posting such ignorant comment.

Yeah it's not partisan to wonder if it's a political move to maximize annoyance to point blame back at the current administration.

Similar to teachers having to buy their own pencils etc but school administrators and their retirement funds never seemed to be cut.

The White House is trying to require at least 85% of grant money go to research and not administration. It’s such an obviously common sense improvement and the first serious proposal to roll back this administrative bloat that I’ve ever seen.

No they’re cutting payments for indirect costs down to 15%. They’re not requiring money be spent on research instead of admin, they’re just giving out less money.

This is not and was never supposed to increase American research productivity. Just the opposite actually, they want less science done in America, and as a bonus they “save” about $5 billion, that is, approximately one half the cost of a single aircraft carrier

This sounds great in theory, until you start looking at the actual things that overhead covers. Things like the cost of my office space, my lab space, electricity, heating, building maintenance, telephone, computer network, IT and tech support, the photocopier machine we share, my admin assistant that handles travel and purchases, the admins in my department that handle grant budgets and compliance (which quite frankly I don't want to personally deal with), and more.

I mentioned Chesterton's Fence in another post here, about really understanding a problem and why things are done in a certain way, before tearing everything down. I'd really encourage people to try to understand things better before jumping to conclusions, it's not all that different from the engineer's disease that often gets mentioned on HN.

Technically they want to limit indirect costs to 15%. This currently ranges from 50%-100%. Indirect costs have two components, facilities and administration.

Facilites are the cost of buildings, electricity, janitorial service, etc. Think of this as things that might be included in the rent if you were renting a place to do the research.

Administration costs are mostly salaries for people, administrative and clerical staff. Not the people directly doing the research (that's a direct cost), but the people in charge of safety/compliance/legal, etc.

Administrative costs have been capped at 25% for a few decades. Facilities costs are not capped.

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