Update on Staff Hiring | Hacker News Reader

Update on Staff Hiring

news.stanford.edu

Congress is proposing increasing the tax on the yield of endowments? Can anyone convince me how this, along with their proposed cuts to the NSF, isn't a direct attack on higher education? I have a low opinion of the reasoning ability of the members of Congress and their knowledge of, well, anything, but are they really that ignorant of how America had achieved its financial, industrial, and technological might?

I'm pretty sure it _is_ a direct attack on higher education.

it's an attack on the managerial class that absolutely deserves to have their funding cut. If you attended university in the US since the turn of the century you would have been party to the dearth of resources dedicated to actual education, especially in comparison to lavish facilities and a bloated administrative staff that, at least in my experience, did nothing except waste money and create policies that actively harmed the pursuit of knowledge

With the amount tuition costs today, it is absolutely embarrassing to see an organization like Stanford complaining about losing subsidies. Subsidies to rich organizations like this are downright regressive.

They'll be fine. Hopefully with fewer useless bureaucrats.

Increasing the tax on the yield of their endowments is your solution for solving that problem?

As far as cutting NSF grants, there are already legal limits in place for how that funding may be used - and it's not to support administrators and facilities. The cut to NSF is a direct cut to research, not college administrators.

And those "subsidies"? They're paying for Ph.D. students, covering their tuition and providing them a stipend. Now those students will be looking to study abroad - and once they leave, they're not likely to come back. Brilliant.

This isn't Stanford's loss, it's ours.

So you believe there’s a bloated administrative and managerial class that spends money on wasteful things while constantly cutting money on useful things.

Let’s accept that without argument.

What makes you think that the exact same bloated administrative class which prioritized useless things and defunded useful things when revenues were increasing will choose to suddenly prioritize useful things when revenues are decreasing?

Wouldn’t the predictable response of the bloated managerial class would be to continue with the same priorities and further cut useful activities making useless activities an even greater proportion of spending?

Given the argument you’re making, wouldn’t the solution be to pass laws or executive orders that instead provided incentives to spend money on useful things?

Yet one of the 2 actions, the endowment tax, is agnostic and doesn’t change incentives at all, and the other targets research which is easily the most directly valuable output of the U.S. university system, therefore further tilting the money away from the useful spending and therefore proportionally more towards useless spending.

They see higher education as a cultural enemy, promoting anti-conservative ideas. They want universities to exist in the most minimal form, teaching workers of the future, but scrambling to survive and not able to exert much cultural influence.

So the plan is to raise endowment tax from 1.4% to 21%.

> raise the excise tax levied on certain private university endowment profits from 1.4% to 21%. [1]

[1] https://nehls.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-troy-e-nehl...

Holy hell. Nobody is ready for that tax bill.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com