Wait until you see how well setting it all on fire works.
At my college, birth control was as free as water. Teaching people to postpone marriage, children, for the sake of career, combined with record-high school debt... might be partly why academia finds themselves in this demographic decline. They told the next generation not to have kids, made it financially impossible to have kids, and lo and behold, there's less kids entering college now.
"Raise house prices now or I'll send you to the principal's office!"
The gays didn't send house prices to the moon. Mexicans didn't send the jobs to China. No, it's the people with assets who pursued asset-pumping policy to great effect. You're right to be angry, but you're a fool to believe them when they point at universities as the source of the problem.
Whatever beef you got is what 'media' fed you selected smug academics to piss you off.
> At my college, birth control was as free as water. Teaching people to postpone marriage, children, for the sake of career, combined with record-high school debt... might be partly why academia finds themselves in this demographic decline. They told the next generation not to have kids, made it financially impossible to have kids, and lo and behold, there's less kids entering college now.
Hard to tell if this is just parody.
I will say that if feel that providing something equates to mandating it... I don't know how we're going to be able to have logical exchanges
I'm not sure what 'half' means here. It's neither true that men make up half of applicants (which are really what we should be focusing on), nor that so-called 'conservatives' make up half of this population.
I am interested in what people have to say about them though.
1. DEI and identity politics prioritization 2. cost
Economists clash frequently with other fields like social sciences because such fields continue to use unfalsifiable and highly flawed epistemic tools like dialectics to advocate for debunked theories like World Systems Theory.
For example, when talking about the economics of healthcare (or anything else, but lets start with healthcare), the conversation is approached from the get-go under the assumption that:
1. Healthcare is already a free market.
2. It is possible for healthcare to be a free market.
1. is just not true. Healthcare, in the US and and all developed nations, is not a free market. But, economists will just assume it is, because they assume everything is a free market, and then apply free market dynamics. Basically, they skip step 1, and go to step 1000.
And, for number 2, it's very debatable. IMO no, healthcare cannot be a free market, just by virtue of what healthcare is as a service. But that's debatable, I won't get into it.
Point is, we immediately start our economic understanding based off assumptions on top of assumptions that come from free market thinking, thinking around IP, thinking about consumer knowledge, thinking about access, etc.
We make absolutely wild and unsubstantiated claims for free, and nobody checks them.
Which economist are you referring to here? It's hard to even see what specific policy conclusions you're critiquing here, beyond a vague strawman against "free market assumptions".
After all, it's not like the epistemologies of the other humanities stands on far more shakier grounds...
Well for whom? Another aspect of this problem is an economic solution can have winners and losers. An economic policy that invokes slavery as solution to labor issues may actually be 'logical' but clearly puts the interests of one group over another. Economics is just the science resource allocation after all. People have some serious biases when it comes to deciding policy on who gets what and how.
Deciding who benefits or not from legislation is not a Economist's domain, their work is descriptive, not normative. You're critiquing politicians here for prioritizing GDP, but that is divorced from your critique of economics. The economist will only tell you what they think will happen with regard to the economy if you pass a bill or not given the goals you've outlined to them.
https://taxfoundation.org/blog/big-beautiful-bill-impact-def...
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61387
Well you look at analysis here, do you then disagree with the predictions of the bill and the methodology used, and if so, what is your better analysis here with supposedly more refined epistemic assumptions?
Among the most dramatic cutbacks was the dismantling of the National Cancer Institute, which halted early detection programs for breast and cervical cancer. Funding was also frozen for immunization campaigns, severely disrupting vaccine access during Argentina's first measles outbreak in decades. The National Directorate for HIV, Hepatitis, and Tuberculosis lost 40 percent of its staff and 76 percent of its budget, delaying diagnosis and treatment across the country. Emergency contraception and abortion pill distribution have also stopped.
Prescription drug prices and private health insurance premiums have surged by 250 percent and 118 percent, respectively, according to official data.
https://www.bignewsnetwork.com/news/278391265/mileis-austeri...
Obviously, this is an article from the political side of things (I tried to cut out value judgements), but these are decisions made by actual economists like José Luis Espert, Agustín Etchebarne, Federico Sturzenegger, Alberto Benegas Lynch and probably a million others I'm not aware of.
Debt crisis is a real problem. We have borrowed more than we can ever repay, all nations, for the last 30 years. Both sides. Just drove right off the cliff.
All models start with givens…
You need a model to design an experiment.
This is how all science is done. You hypothesize. Then experiment.
Economics both describe and prescribe, so those models should be evaluated on their predictive power and on whether they have actually done any good.
Sure. Nobody claimed that. I’m just pointing out that being upset that a model makes assumptions is nonsense.
(I don't feel like anyone is upset?)
Nobody does this.
If you start talking about competition or consumer choice, surprise! You have made an extremely bold assumption: that healthcare is currently operating as a free market.
That assumption is actually, like, 1000 assumptions. Do people prove even one of those? No. They just move on and hope nobody notices.
And, well, we don't. We're so used to these economy falacies that they're practically invisible.
...and they turn around and complain about liberals' "moral purity."
All AI growth today, is actually from Academia from 20 years ago.
I see billionaires as "water-balloon" (wealth) hoarders, and I see taxes on the rich as thorns on bushes. If the politicians ever wanted to make "trickle down" work, then we need thornier bushes and to make it impossible for rich people to not go through thorny bushes.
But the whole deregulation craze has made it so that the billionaires don't even need people to help them protect their "water-balloons"...
Institutional administrators confiscate 50, 60, 70% of every research grant.
Institutions demand published work even when results do not warrant it, and demote professors honest enough to document a null result.
The peer review system then rubber stamps papers with no actual review or reproduction. Journals blacklist professors who withhold endorsement.
The result? 90%+ of academic science is fraud. But which 90%? We need to drastically reform this system.
Seriously, 90%? None of what you said is happening at anywhere near that scale. Touch grass.
1. Our top researchers are wasting their time and energy promoting projects for grants. 2. Any attempt by the public to oversee or guide these grants is thwarted by smart people. 3. If you try to learn more about where the money is going or what’s being counted as science people on HN will call it “anti-intellectual propoganda”.
>1. Our top researchers are wasting their time and energy promoting projects for grants.
There are all kinds of scientists, some do the research, some do the writing, some do the grantsmanship. Getting money to fund an idea is not lesser than, it is often the hardest part. It takes understanding an communication skills to convince a panel of peer-experts that your ideas are good enough to give millions of dollars to.
> 2. Any attempt by the public to oversee or guide these grants is thwarted by smart people.
There is a tremendous amount of publicly available oversight at every step, including opportunity for public commentary.
Just because you personally don't know it exists, doesn't mean that it does not exist.
>3. If you try to learn more about where the money is going or what’s being counted as science people on HN will call it “anti-intellectual propoganda”.
Again. Its all public info. Its all publicly presented. If you ask, scientists will leap at the chance to tell you what they did and how they spent that money.
Please. PLEASE. I am begging you. Learn about a subject before forming an opinion about it.
I actually lived it, so thanks for your understanding and consideration.
> Getting money to fund an idea is not lesser than, it is often the hardest part.
Difficulty is not value. Extremely talented people are doing arbitrary waste work!
And you’re right - promotors aren’t lesser. They are greater - more valued in academic job placement and promotion.
> There is a tremendous amount of publicly available oversight at every step,
Did you miss the prior comment? The existing oversight is ineffective. Researchers see it as a hoop to jump through.
> If you ask, scientists will leap at the chance to tell you what they did
Personal communication is not systematic public reporting.
Also professors tend to use a two job approach: stuff they like, and stuff that’s important for their career. Unless I attend a specialized conference I won’t hear about the latter, except in a form crafted for public reception. That’s the one that gets grants.
> Again. Its all public info. Its all publicly presented.
There is public info - but it’s a facade. It’s constructed with the goal of appeasing the public requirements.
> yes you are buying into (or actively promoting) anti-intellectualism.
Name calling.
Grants are hard, not because of admin/paperwork, but because coming up with a novel idea is hard and convincing others to fund it is harder.
The people leading the grants are the ones creating and guiding the ideas. They set the agenda.
A tech CEO doesn't spend their days coding minor bug fixes, in the same way a PI doesn't spend their days doing lab work. They are leaders, who are occupied getting funding and setting the direction.
>Did you miss the comment we are replying to? The existing oversight is ineffective. It’s just a hoop for the professor to jump through.
It's not ineffective though, and an excess of PhDs is not a collapse, it is a boon.
>Personal communication is not systematic public reporting.
You have absolutely no clue how much public reporting is involved in grants. Just a complete ignorant comment right here.
>There is public info - but it’s a facade. It’s constructed with the goal of appeasing the public requirements.
Conspiracy bullshit. Take your meds.
>Also professors tend to use a two job approach: stuff they like, and stuff that’s important for their career.
Wrong. Every PI I know does the stuff they like, and they get it well funded, because they are the best in the world at what they do.
>I actually lived it, so thanks for your understanding and consideration.
You post about tech and programming and call yourself a "software engineer".
>yes you are buying into (or actively promoting) anti-intellectualism. >Name calling.
Good. You should feel ashamed for the way you are acting.
Yes, we are in agreement. That's why promoters are so valuable.
> in the same way a PI doesn't spend their days doing lab work.
This large workforce of Phd's protecting the time of the PI also represents a massive allocation of young intelligent talent, and that's part of my concern.
> an excess of PhDs is not a collapse, it is a boon.
It's difficult to talk about demand for required credentials. A large percentage is foreigners securing visas to work in the US.
> You have absolutely no clue how much public reporting is involved in grants. Just a complete ignorant comment right here.
> Conspiracy bullshit. Take your meds.
I think researchers put a great deal of care into public reporting. And I think they use their intellect to construct a story conducive to their careers. Who doesn't?
I am aware of researchers who use a technique where they get funding for a project that is basically finished, and use the funds for more speculative research. TTheir sources of funding expect more predictability than they can realistically provide. Wouldn't you say that represents a gap in the public's visibility?
> Every PI I know does the stuff they like
I don't doubt they are passionate and driven. I'm saying something different. When you are in the thick of establishing yourself you have to care more about what system cares about (this is maybe your situation?), and modern competition makes this all encompassing. But the book they write in sabbatical tends to look different than their official title.
> they get it well funded, because they are the best in the world at what they do.
How would we falsify this statement?
> You post about tech and programming and call yourself a "software engineer".
PhD to software engineer is a common career path.
> Good. You should feel ashamed for the way you are acting.
Name calling doesn't sound intellectual to me. I choose not to reciprocate.
EDIT: to focus on my personal beliefs and not yours.
>I am aware of researchers who use a technique where they get funding for a project that is basically finished, and use the funds for more speculative research. Their sources of funding expect more predictability than they can realistically provide. Wouldn't you say that represents a gap in the public's visibility?
Their grant is public record. Their oversight during that grant is public record. Their regulatory approvals are public record. Their publications are public record.
"Basically finished" is not finished. It is not finished unless it has been published. Your statement is like saying "its wrong for a baker to buy an oven if he already has the flour and sugar. The cake is basically finished. He is just putting future costs into this current cake".
Most grant applications include prior work, current work, and future work. A program officer will make site visits and assess current work and upcoming work. Funding of a grant is not "do X thing and publish, end of project and money:. It is the pursuit of an idea. If task 1 is "basically finished" the PO will push for publication of that and moving on to the next aim.
In many cases having an aim "basically finished" is a good thing. It shows that prior work is successful and future work can produce similar success. Most grants have multiple aims and several sub-aims. If one aim is finished, they move on to the next. If all the aims are complete, the grant usually indicates next steps. The PI and PO will have discussed the next steps long before they are carried out.
If the PI chooses use some funds from a grant to carry out speculative research. Good. GOOD. That is what scientific inquiry is meant for. Not all research can be speculative. Not at research can be mainstream. It is a mix, based on opportunity and expertise.
This is grants 101. Please, again, I'm not lecturing you on software development, because it is not my expertise. Please understand scientific funding before lecturing me about it.
>Name calling doesn't sound intellectual to me. I choose not to reciprocate.
Its not name calling to call out your anti-intellectualism. You are contributing to the decline of American science, and I will not stand for it.
That’s actually not what I said.
> If the PI chooses use some funds from a grant to carry out speculative research. Good. GOOD. That is what scientific inquiry is meant for.
My claim is not about good or bad. My claim is that there is a gap between how science is done and how it is presented to the public.
> This is grants 101
You seem to agree such a gap exists, you just think it’s a good thing or a matter of business.
> because it is not my expertise
So notice when I bring up correct information, I’m told I don’t have the experience/expertise to do so despite my academic union card.
Please do share opinions about software. We have no professional organization. People argue with ideas.
> You are contributing to the decline of American science, and I will not stand for it.
you seem to identify intellectualism as a group of people or an organization.
I think that’s a mockery of truth and ideas.
Yes American science as a family of organizations deserves scrutiny and critiques. Funding these organizations is not an absolute public good.
There is a gap between how software is written and how it is used by the public.
Clearly computers are flawed and need a complete rework.
>Please do share opinions about software. We have no professional organization. People argue with ideas.
Software is a illuminati scam perpetrated by bitter typesetters forced to get funding in a system they don't believe in. Anyone who says otherwise is in on it.
>Funding these organizations is not an absolute public good.
Are they flawless, no. Have they done more public good than any organization in history (or at least top 3)? yes.
And your response is to poo-poo the whole system because you had a bad time in your PhD. Sad.
They deserve scrutiny and critique from an informed point of view on what science can accomplish for the public, that is, what science can do for the absolute public good. "This doesn't work like I thought it did!" is not necessarily, in and of itself, an absolute public bad. It is, unfortunately, a cost of doing business in employing specialized labor to do specialized work.
Driving a truck doesn't work how the broad public thinks it does, either.
Yes, I would say that represents a gap between a public who want to see a science factory in which not one single blueberry muffin is ever wasted on an unworthy grad-student's wasteful seminar, and the actual reality of how science works. The problem is that going, "aha, gotcha, you were HIDING these ILLICIT SEMINARS on SPECULATIVE WORK!" doesn't educate the public on how science really works and also doesn't make the seminars unnecessary. If you eliminate all the scientific processes that don't conform to an uninformed popular image of white-collar "efficiency" (eg: Office Space), you won't have any good scientists left, because they'll fuck off to private-sector jobs where you don't have to justify a blueberry muffin to a hostile Senate subcommittee.
(For anyone wondering if I'm hungry or something, in January 2025 my lab's parent university forbade us from providing lunch during lab meetings because they were informed that the incoming Administration was going to start looking for efficiencies in scientific grant funding.)
All oversight is a hoop to jump through in a low-trust principal-agent system. Adding oversight bureaucracy partially helps in aligning the scientists to the public interests (after all, if they're working on something totally disconnected from funding goals, they won't get funded) but can never really increase public trust in the scientists or the grant-agency bureaucrats.
You can trust professionals to do their jobs as they see fit and write them a check, or you can make them "waste" time proving to you they're doing the job you want them to do. You can't have low-trust and low-effort grant administration.
Not even the Trump admin is alleging levels of indirect costs that high. See e.g.
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-0...
"Yet the average indirect cost rate reported by NIH has averaged between 27% and 28% over time."
and a lot of that is simply because nobody wants to do the detailed accounting for things like: lab electricity usage, janitorial services, misc supplies.
> The result? 90%+ of academic science is fraud.
This is dramatic nonsense; a simple made up number.
The 70% "indirect cost" number had latched into my brain. I was willing to concede this point, but it looks like 50, 60, 70% are accurate as of 2025 [0].
While there exist institutions with only 30% indirect cost, every single not-especially-prestigious university in my region are retaining 60% or more.
[0] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48540
> As of May 2025, indirect cost reimbursements for [institutions of higher education (IHE)] are typically determined by an indirect cost rate that is pre-negotiated with the federal government and varies by IHE—ranging from 30% to 70%.
This all started when the govt began withholding federal funding in an attempt to clamp down on campus protests
This is definitely not why the 'govt began withholding federal funding'
I've said it multiple times, Trump and his folks see higher education as the enemy, the anti-Christ that corrupts their vision of America. Protests and admin bureaucracy (give me a fucking break) are just convenient excuses.
That is not true. Those happened in 2024.
The extortionate demands are happening in 2025.
The campus protests are clearly a pretext.
Can you demonstrate how those administration departments were bloated (in any way)
edit: re-added "administration" which I had, for some reason, neglected to add, thinking that it was obvious that that was what I was talking about.
https://students.bowdoin.edu/bowdoin-review/features/death-b...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/admini...
I feel like this is an example where we can get almost everyone behind reducing costs at college by showing better data. If you were to show, for example, that 7x is almost all carbon emissions admins then I think we'd see a ton of support to cut these positions. But it may also be the case that people see the admin responsibilities and say, "Oh... OK, that makes sense". The problem is -- with this data, I have no idea.
> Purdue administrator: a “$172,000 per year associate vice provost had been hired to oversee the work of committees charged with considering a change in the academic calendar” who defended their role to a Bloomberg reporter by stating “‘[my] job is to make sure these seven or eight committees are aware of what’s going on in the other committees.’”
> serve primarily as liaisons between bureaucratic arms. “Health Promotion Specialist”, “Student Success Manager,” and “Senior Coordinator, Student Accountability” are all positions currently available on higheredjobs.com. A Harvard Crimson article considered the university’s recent Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) “Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage”, a 24 member-strong committee including 9 administrators.
That's not really helpful, because, as I said to the other poster and have subsequently been down voted for it - that's not genuine analysis, we don't know anything about who is being described as "administration" nor do we know why they're there in the first place.
This is why i want hard facts.
1. It's not my head in the sand. 2. Do you have any actual hard, credible, facts?
An anecdote is not data, not ever.
No matter how you try to spin things, your claim was worth less than the recycled electrons it rode in on.
The pointlessness of your claims is upsetting you, because you've been found out. I get it, you thought that you could get away with BS, but you got called out instead.
If you have hard facts, that are credible and verifiable, you can post them at any time.
You don't have those, that's why you resorted to insults.
Compared to almost any activity a university could take, it is incredibly cheap to bring in mathematics PhD students.
An academic CS department has to attract PhD level talent in hot areas like ML while only paying $30k a year.
On the purely financial side, many top students work internships during the summers and make 40 or 50 thousand dollars during that time in addition to their academic stipend.
Starting your career 10 years earlier (effectively) and immediately progressing in your career probably gets you further. Especially if you look towards management, which is where the money is (usually, million dollar AI research salaries is a new thing).
Also a PHD is not 10 years long? You start your career 4-5 years after a typical BS in CS
In the mid 2000s, natural language modelling was a joke and the best performing ML systems for sentiment analysis would lose in benchmarks to emoji counters. Today, people with a PhD in ML language modelling and years of experience delivering projects in industry are finding the PhD in ML really pays off.
But what about someone who spent the mid 2000s working on formal methods for static analysis? Or a compiler responding to the challenges created by Intel's Itanium architecture? Or trying to fit FPGA accelerator boards into the niche CUDA fills today?
Well, honestly their career's probably still going fine, they're a smart person and there's been many years of high demand for competent programmers. But industry isn't beating their door down; the beneficial effects of the PhD will be a lot less obvious.
Honestly a lot of PhDs go to people from cultures that prize education; and to people from upper-middle-class backgrounds who've been brought up to do well in school, follow their passions, no need to worry too much about money.
What does a graduate math program need? A building with some offices and classrooms, wifi, email service, maybe a couple of secretaries and janitors, office supplies, and salaries for students and researchers/instructors.
What need does a math program have for any but the most basic administration? That's where all the money is going, where the biggest growth in spending is going.
You could cut university admin costs by 75% and lose nothing. Start with the top 25 university presidents who all earn a slightly rounded up 2 million a year and more.
Most of the time, when you hear a politician saying that universities should / should not do X, they are effectively saying that universities should spend more on administration.
Universities with a residential campus have a lot of staff in functions unrelated to the academic mission, such as student housing, food services, healthcare, or sports facilities. If they have to compete for students instead of most people just automatically choosing the nearest university, focusing on these tends to make them more competitive. And while student amenities are not particularly important to PhD students, they are important to the university if it also educates undergraduates.
Then there is the organization chart. In a traditional university, the faculty senate (or another similar body) is in charge and all administrators are subordinate to it. But the modern world prefers centralized organizations, with administrators at the top. And whoever is in charge also determines the priorities of the organization.
People say that, but could you really? I'd love to see a breakdown on how you pull this off.
University admin work expands to the available workforce and I've heard first person accounts from long time senior university staff about admin employees who literally didn't do anything of any conceivable consequence.
You can say “cut salaries in half” about any industry. You could say it about software engineers. But just because you say that doesn’t mean it’ll work out well for the industry. Non-minimum wage salaries should be market driven. I doubt you could just cut salaries in half and keep a reasonable work force.
There are extreme downsides - for many colleges athletics is a money-maker. So is administering IP. There's is also lots of real estate, which appreciates value, but needs maintenance.
The big reason for all the extras is that it makes the school known, in a very big and important way. They host conferences, have archives that receive donations, give out awards.
Donors give all sorts of weird tasks - and funding to achieve them.
Modern colleges are so many different things.
There is a subset of colleges that adopt the "keep it simple" approach, but they often run into lots of trouble. The big problem is without doing tons of stuff, people forget they exist.
It's a bit like drug companies advertising at the super bowl. They hate doing it, but don't have a choice.
It sounds like people don't understand bureaucracy is always imperfect. If it was perfect then you don't need to create another agency called DOGE while having Congressional Budget Office and do exactly the same things.
The question should be is there fraud/fat/waste which has a meaningful impact? If not then it changing it wouldn't really matter. The unfortunate thing is that anecdotal evidence rules supreme and there are enemies every where.
"Data doesn't support a meaningful impact? I saw it with my own eyes so it should be true and the person reporting the data must have Democrat agenda"
They don't attend classes after ~2 years, mostly operate independently besides consulting with their advisor, don't take anywhere near a professor's salary, teach or TA classes, act as lab technicians, and bring in money through grants.
The costs are mostly upfront in the form of providing the necessary research facilities to attract research-oriented faculty and students, and the administrative staff needed to ensure compliance with grant terms.
In America the students at the undergraduate and masters levels pay to pursue their degrees, while the PhDs are paid by the school. As these students do not directly generate revenue, the PhD programs will be first on the chopping block and the admin who make the 'tough decisions' to keep the ship afloat will be off at their next jobs by the time the chickens come home to roost.
The alternative would be hiring dedicated employees to help with grading and lab sessions, and they won't tolerate the $30k/yr a PhD student does. This would have immediate impacts too, as there's no way a lone professor can keep up with grading for the class sizes in early undergrad.