"This expansion is largely at the School of Medicine, where the yearly staff growth rate of 5.6% is significantly higher than the 1.7% rate across the rest of the University...
School of Medicine spokesperson Courtney Lodato wrote that the increase largely includes clinical educators who teach and provide clinical care, financed by external research funds from government and industry sources"
Haven't seen anyone mention this yet: there is a difference between "listed employees" vs. "full time employees" (FTEs) vs. "full time employee equivalents" (FTEEs). In this very specific case, physicians/providers often work 0.125-0.875 (i.e. one hour to seven hours of an 8 hour day) for one entity (say, their primary teaching hospital), and the remainder for another entity (the university where they are also an listed as adjunct professor, etc.).
You could have 10,000 employees, however 4,000 of them are physicians/providers, 3,000 of whom work less than full time for that entity. So you are looking at 10,000 employees, but some number between 7,000 and 9,999 FTEEs. These are very different, and very relevant, numbers when looking at healthcare organizations.
"Methodology & Definitions
Staff Headcount
Staff headcounts include all regular, benefits-eligible university employees. With rare exceptions, employees must be appointed at 50% FTE (full-time equivalent) or more for at least six consecutive months in order to be eligible for benefits. The Professoriate and employees of SLAC are not included. Employees with multiple jobs are counted only in the job that is tied to their benefits, typically the one with the largest number of standard hours."
In the US, many Medical schools are schools only in the technical definition of schools. In reality they are more like research and medical centers that also do a bit of teaching on the side. Staff to students ratio could easily be in excess of 10:1
A little over a decade ago, I remember Dean of a top medical school I attended showing the budget of the medical school. Tuition was like 5% or of the entire med school revenue and budget. I remember raising my hand and asking the Dean if tuition was so little, why not just make it free. He gave me a death stare and just danced around the question.
The post you responded to was about how medical schools are “schools” in name only. You may be correct that administrators are useless, but your kid’s experience, assuming they are in medical school is not really evidence because they don’t see more than a sliver of what the school does (and needs to do, by law).
In this case, you've been refuted by an explanation that the growth is almost entirely at the school of medicine, and most of that increase has been in staff that are providing care. And you're continuing to advance the point anyways.
I mean, if you tack on a hospital to a university, the correct denominator to compare against is "patients served," not "students educated," at least for the portion of the headcount you're sticking in the numerator.
Hospitals attached to universities aren't in general "tacked on" but are a part of the educational environment. They exist not only to serve patients but to educate students.
No, of course, but is the primary focus of the bulk of the staff educational or patient care? Seems disingenuous to pretend it's the former just to make a point.
Total staff numbers are only marginally useful without further breakdown, as that article points out.
A family member works for an eatery at a large university. Technically they are employees (staff) of the university, but pretty much in name only. They work for a business unit which receives no financial support from the university. They are profitable on their own and if they aren’t, they would close down. They are provided benefits via the university, but it is part of their budget.
Including them in the count relative to students is about as useful as including the employees of the (independent) Starbucks on campus.
(It’s not Stanford, so I can’t speak to that specific institution)
What is "staff"? Is there a break down on how much "staff" is involved in research tasks vs admin tasks? Research nowadays is complex and requires a lot of technical support, a lot of people who are hired as technical-administrative stuff may do actually purely research tasks [0]. As usually faculty captures people in some "professorship" level, it completely misses this big crowd of research-related work.
Externally funded research also come with many compliance, reporting, and other requirements [1]. Administrative staff are the ones who handle these responsibilities. If funding agencies want fewer administrators, require less oversight.
It might be insane, if you believe that "staff" are all doing administrative duties. But, as was pointed out, "staff" are often anyone who is not a tenure track faculty. So librarians, research technicians, environmental health and safety, IT support, etc etc.
A more useful comparison would divide staff into "supported by tuition" (should be related to student count) and "supported by external grants and clinical income".
This idea that costs have increased because of administrative staff expansion is a popular one, but one that ignores what R1 universities spend money on, and where that money comes from. (Ironically, I suspect that the university may be spending more money on research, because of limits on indirect costs.)
> Every University’s purported mission is to educate students and advance our
> collective knowledge together with its students.
> That’s it.
Not if the university has a medical school. Virtually all R1 universities with medical schools have a hospital, and a large clinical practice. Most of medical school is an apprenticeship where you treat patients. Medical schools need patients, which means a lot of additional staff.
Likewise, in most fields it is no longer possible to advance knowledge just by going to the library or writing on a white board. Knowledge is advanced through experimentation, and experimental equipment and reagents cost money, and need staff to use and maintain them.
No university (and certainly no medical school), makes enough money in tuition and fees to pay for the education provided, and I seriously doubt that many universities have supported themselves solely through tuition since the beginning of the universities in the middle ages.
You are certainly correct that university deans and presidents have seen their mission shift with the increasing cost of education, and indeed faculty are writing many more grants than they did 75 years ago. So time commitments have shifted. But there is an implication that it could have been some other way -- that the money is there (or could have been there) if some other path were chosen. It is hard for me to imagine where the money might have come from.
> Stanford also has unique characteristics that create high staff headcount, former Provost Persis Drell told the Faculty Senate during a May 2023 meeting: Unlike other institutions, Stanford requires more staff to maintain Stanford Research Park, a large housing portfolio and other facilities.
from one of the sources [0] that paragraph linked to:
> It’s also important to understand how Stanford defines terms used in headcount growth since those definitions vary widely among research universities, Drell noted. For example, clinician educators, which have grown significantly in number, are categorized as “staff” at Stanford, while at other universities they are often counted as “faculty.” In addition, and in contrast to many other institutions, Stanford has chosen to focus more on hiring staff in many areas rather than using outside contractors whose employees would not count as Stanford staff.
and from [1] also linked in the above paragraph:
> We recognize that stable, affordable housing is critical for student success. Stanford guarantees housing for undergraduates for all four years and provides housing for over 70% of graduate students. We also provide as much as three times more student housing than large universities across California in similarly constrained housing markets.
given the context, it seems perfectly reasonable that Stanford would have more "staff" employees than the University of Southwestern North Dakota, even normalized for different numbers of student enrollment.
This is also the fallacy of looking at one metric.
Do staff include productive researchers producing net positive incoming?
Other comments mention the medical school. Are these staff providing patient care (and billing insurance)?
University staff aren’t necessarily just your traditional educators. A whole lot of productive stuff (both for the university and everyone else) can potentially benefit from “staff.”
Universities run small cities. That staff number includes the people who mow the lawn, cook food, clean dorms, work security, maintain their networks, etc the list is massive.
This seems like a low-value comment without some data. For example, can you identify the specific jobs which you consider resort-like and how much of the growth they contribute to?
Without knowing more about the numbers, the only one I have an issue with is the number of students. These universities should be doing everything they can to increase enrollment and let in more students.
I went to a smaller school in my city, but at the time most everyone I know who applied got it. I would not get it today, and people end up wait listed, etc... IMO, that is the failing of the US higher education system. Next is cost to the student.
virtually every sector of the economy has 'excess staff;' it is not confined to higher ed. It's the obvious conclusion of decades of automation not being realized as less working hours, but in the dilution of responsibilities into more complicated and larger corporate apparatuses. Some of them are called "bullshit jobs" some of them are given credibility, while being utterly purposeless ultimately. This is largely ignored as a general trend because it is usually contextualized to a narrative within each company (as is the case here) rather than seen as a larger phenomenon.
This is the inevitable conclusion of unprecedented concentration of capital, which is not new but only being revealed during a time of seemingly limitless automation potential.
Didn't those already exist before? Is there lot more of that type of work? Or shouldn't it be done more efficiently now? Also aren't those increasingly out-sourced so shouldn't count in that stat?
I would assume non-student TAs (who do teach students), lab technical staff (who maintain equipment and and more directly enable teaching than janitorial staff) and such are also all non-staff.
Universities try to hire grad students as TAs to help them out, but sometimes hire outsiders as TAs. It could be because the undergrad major has lots of students but the corresponding graduate major has few.
Obviously this varies from university to university and I know nothing about Cornell.
>I would assume non-student TAs (who do teach students), lab technical staff (who maintain equipment and and more directly enable teaching than janitorial staff) and such are also all non-staff.
We might need to know the FTE values to understand what this means. Are staff positions full-time FTE? Are faculty positions full-time, tenure positions? Have they added part-time staff, adjunct faculty, etc.?
The other insane thing is 10 students to one teacher? I don't understand that because when I went to SJSU, I was almost always in a class with 60+. For CS, it was around 30 people in the room.
It could also just mean they do more research and less education. But hey, let's quickly jump to conclusions, that seems to be a popular hobby nowadays.
So you're saying the ratio has improved? An education improving their ratio of faculty to students seems like a good thing.
Aren't all the big bad billionaires self-made autodidacts?
Most people aren't. Most people benefit from education. If there are unlimited AGI educators, that seems like an extraordinary claim and I haven't even seen a pilot. Is the plan to move fast and break education? Cause that seems kind of extreme rather than any sort of conservative I've ever known.
Do you just want to destroy those posh academic institutions? Or are the billionaires offering to subsidize education with donations by increasing taxes on themselves?
Or you don't realize that "faculty" can include researchers?
Contemporary academia especially in the West has a massive surplus of staff.
Many people pursue academic careers solely for a comfortable lifestyle, doing minimal or even no research for long period of time. With extra lack of oversight that allows researchers to isolate themselves they create circles which cover each other.
Occasionally, folks outside of the circle come in and they start finding ton of fraud in the research with multiple big cases in past few years on top universities like Harvard for example.
"Many people pursue academic careers solely for a comfortable lifestyle, doing minimal or even no research for long period of time. With extra lack of oversight that allows researchers to isolate themselves they create circles which cover each other."
I want what you're smoking because that might be one of the biggest fabrications I've heard in a long time.
I found 2. One is an ongoing lawsuit and the other seems mostly like stupidity because people keep falling for the stupid AI grift. I can barely trust AI to produce basic boilerplate and they are trying to verify novel research with it?
You don’t spent an endowment, you spend the interest. The entire research budget comes from outside funding. In Cornell’s case, the research funding amounts to $1B a year.
Just for perspective, the annual research budget of a university I looked at the numbers for recently (not Cornell, but R1) would go through that in less than two decades, even if it were completely dedicated to research and nothing else.
Tech transfer is an important function, however, tech transfer offices outside perhaps the top 15 or 20 in the US (public and private) are not profitable in terms of dollars. AUTM (tech transfer trade group) has extensive data on the subject.
Still I can't work up a tear for universities with large endowments when the top 10 universities sit pretty on 304 billion dollars out of 840 billion total, while charging insane and exponentially rising tuition fees.
and you're assuming they invest like you do in your 401k or whatever. which they most certainly don't. some are more aggressive w.r.t. private markets investment but many focus on capital preservation and don't grow as much as you'd expect. FY24 Cornell's endowment returned something like 8%. this despite an S&P500 gain of, what, 23% ish.
institutions and allocators operate with a very different mindset versus individuals or hedgies.
Uncle Sam doesn’t have a credit limit: Uncle Sam has chosen to take on debt so rich people can avoid paying taxes. If we had rich people pay at the same rates they paid a few decades ago, didn’t have caps on the maximum amount of taxable income for social security, etc. we could return to the balanced budget we had at the turn of the century before the Republicans lowered taxes for the express political goal of forcing program cuts.
Can you really not think of any ways that our economy is different from those? For example, were either of them the largest economy in the world operating the global benchmark currency? Were their debts voluntary, incurred solely to allow the richest people to pay less in taxes?
How about Uncle Sam starts taking money back from rich people instead of foisting more debt on workers and slashing my benefits so that they can buy another yacht?
And what?
You know that for example endowment funds have restrictions on what they can be spent on.
This is really victim blaming.
I would not have an issue if the government has said that for future grant rounds there will be limits on overheads, but this lot just decided they cut already agreed and planned budgets and no matter the consequences.
To be invested and generate returns which can fund the university's programs. As I said in another comment, it's a long-term investment, not a spending fund. You don't eat your seed corn.
> In particular, the endowment supports roughly two-thirds of the budget for undergraduate and graduate financial aid, as well as a significant portion of faculty salaries, research, and key programs like libraries and student services.
The returns from the endowment are used to support university programs. The endowment itself is not spent - it's a long-term investment which produces dividends, not a spending fund.
Universities will dip into endowment funds if the returns are worse than expected. They will pretty much never make plans to dip into endowment funds, though.
Money in university budgets is most certainly not fungible. Endowments are for the most part directed for specific uses and cannot be used outside of the restrictions. Education and General (E&G, terminology varies between institutions) includes tuition (only part of the yearly budget) and cannot be used for research. Unrestricted funds are as rare as hens teeth and doubly so outside upper admin.
The “color of money” is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of university admin but explains so much about how things operate.
To be fair, I hear the Ivies have extremely generous scholarships (probably amortized by the nepotism acceptances). Much fewer people of financial need are graduating these schools in massive debt.
Not going to lie, I felt the 2025 market would get worse but never thought to have "(potential) mass government layoff" on my bingo card.
What are unemployed people even finding these days? Is everyone just giving in to the gig economy? Sadly my car is definitely on its last legs (probably saved by the pandemic) so I don't know how long it'd last if I did Doordash/Uber
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On topic, it's a shame even an Ivy League is feeling a result of this economy and administration. What does that say about any other public school? Is post-secondary education going to collapse?
It's all about the choices. Post secondary schools had easy money (student loans, grants, expanding endowments) and rapidly expanding enrollment for decades. It seems many schools thought that would continue, but we saw enrollment plateau and even decrease. Ivy schools have options - lower prestige to increase enrollment, or lean on prestige and endowments to raise prices. Other schools will likely cut staff/services and increase class sizes. I went to a state school and their enrollment has dropped 25% since I was there. It seems tuition went up, state funding per student is higher (not sure if total is the same or higher), some upgrades were put off, and some services seem to have been scaled back.
> Ivy schools have options - lower prestige to increase enrollment, or lean on prestige and endowments to raise prices.
Ivies aren’t dependent on tuition at all. All have need-blind admissions and most offer full rides to anyone accepted who couldn’t pay otherwise. Penn just updated its income thresholds to provide guaranteed full tuition scholarships to families earning less than 200k a year and budgeted over $300m/year to cover it. These aren’t the box-top Us you’re looking for.
I learned from 2016 and didn't discount the idea of Trump winning again. I just didn't think he'd enact it. He'd be blocked by properly smart people who realize across the board that "this will impact my money".
And to be fair some smart people (in the courts) are blocking it. I just didn't think so many illegal actions in the course of a month would escalate this far without. It makes Nixon look like the Dali Lhama.
How are the ivy leagues NOT financially independent? People claw/cheat/do whatever it takes to get in. Ivy's employ some of the best raw IQ people we have. Endowment funds over years should blossom.
Could they be so smart to 'redline', to maximally extract as much funds from the Gov as possible while also pumping up their investments? Or might they not have managed funds well enough and truly cannot afford things?
if scenario 1) refactor expenses, pass an audit, and make a plan to build up funds. return to 75% prior budget levels
if scenario 2) refactor expenses, pass an audit, and make a plan to build up funds. return to 25% prior budget levels
*in both cases we need to remove regulations on schools so they can fire all the admin (they claim to need to keep up legally inane wild things) and pay the professors/researchers more.
Colleges and Universities are already on a downward trend; the perfect storm of declining enrollment/population numbers and AI potentially wiping out what they offer. Colleges and University were meant to be a special protected Eunuch class studying 'the dark arts', but they've publicly become known havens of scheming Eunuchs trying to overthrow the emperor. Too close to the sun
I assume they, like most orgs, make a planning based on some available budget. If the budget gets higher, they will expand. If it gets lower, they will reduce their expenses/spread. I also assume that the reduction of overhead in particular is gonna hurt such institutions _a lot_ because they have exactly planned based on that.
I cannot speak about Cornell specifically, I do not know if they have a bloated administration or superfluous expenses. But the truth is that admin stuff are necessary for supporting education and research. Having been in universities during admin reforms reducing admin stuff (claiming that they make "smart restructuring") it always negatively affects work done in the university in one way or another. Usually, it means that research staff will have to pick up some of the admin work themselves, or be offered less support doing it. As research staff are usually paid more than admin stuff, that is not necessarily effective (unless it is assumed that research stuff will be working overtime anyway). In any case, it does not seem like an efficient move most of the times, even if it seems so to the bureaucrats who make these plans.
I imagine they are, but they will still have some mindset of a business and cut spending in lieu of economic headwinds. Like pretty much every industry in the last few years.
I think the ivies will be fine. It's 99% of other universities without 10b in endowments I'm worried about.
you got the academic and economics right. but ignored the politics. academic politics is very exclusive... and the circle in it owns lots of capital. so when capital goes on strike, they fall in line.
While I understand that people have their problems with universities tuition and loans ..etc. The problem is here is that funding for basic and applied science on all front is being cut. It does provide a lot of jobs and supports a lot of universities operations too. Universities build labs which does provide infrastructure (buildings and other facilities) and NSF, NIH and DOE provide funds to use these facilities to pursue research. So these agencies have dependency on universities to provide these research facilities and manage hiring and compliance with rules.
Now there are many problems with current system which need to be addressed. But you don't solve the cancer in the cells by killing cells and thus killing patient. But you use targeted approach to the problem. This needs some modifications to the rules and deep changes in laws that will require further study and discussion. This is of course not going to happen currently.
Now some people argue that the budget is a problem and debt and deficit is more important. But again lets talk data. The whole NSF and NIH budget is less than $60B dollars in 2024 which amounts to a little bit less than 1% of the total budget. If you compare it with other Items in the budget percentage wise you will get (DoD - 7.5%), (Medicare - 6.7%), (Social Security - 4.6%), (Medicaid - 10%),(National Debt Interest - 15%). So even cutting it all will not achieve any significant improvement while create a lot of problems. There are a significant part of economy and jobs are supported by these money. The return on investment is positive in most cases and you are leading in innovation and most of scientific frontier. One can argue that these two items are very cheap to maintain you dominance than another couple of air craft carriers (and their operation costs).
If you tried and achieved any reduction in the big items in the federal budget you will be saving something near the total budget of NIH and NSF. But again for some reason a lot of focus on these programs while less focus on big items for some reason.
My working theory is that wage growth was getting to be too much for the corporations so flooding the market with candidates is meant to counteract that.
Not mentioned -- Cornell has an $11bn endowment that can be tapped to make up some of the shortfall. Any issues with Federal funding will be hurting smaller schools and schools with smaller endowments way before hurting Cornell.
If anything in any country should be free, it should be education.
And, obviously, the administration of education should never be a for-profit venture.
Valuing democracy and being able to select sensible leaders depends on it.
>If anything in any country should be free, it should be education.
I can't tell you're being serious or you're being hyperbolic for the sake of defending education. Most people, given the choice would rather get free food, water, or healthcare.
Where I come [1] from, they would prefer education over everything else .
Material benefits or wealth can be stolen away on the whim of the stronger party, as history has proven over and over again.
No one can steal my education however.
—-
[1] This is a thing both the strong and weaker groups understood very well for over 3000 years. Who could learn which skills and therefore do what job is what the caste system was all about .
Teachers were and are considered only step below God, your teachers commands supersede even those of parents . Stories like those of ekalavya are venerated for a reason.
The power of knowledge and education was well understood and also closely guarded to create and manage oppression for thousands of years
There's so much that you cannot learn from the Internet, but must practiced, coached, steered, etc. That needs fysical things to interact with. That need teams, colleagues, or other humans.
People who think you can learn "everything" from the Internet have a very limited view of "everything". And could probably learn about the world by going out there ;)
I've learned a lot more from YouTube videos than anything else, and even without archive.org there's all the other shadow libraries I can get books from.
But sure, keep telling yourself that your overpriced "education" is worth anything in this era of truly massive information access.
Amongst all the things I have learned last decades is Beekeeping.
Yes, I watched online video. Read books, blogs etc.
But the true learning was done as apprentice with a few experienced beekeepers.
Beekeeping is only a part theory. There's a big part of practice. From training precise and calm hand movements to how to properly tucking in your vest to listening, feeling, and reading bees mood.
My point isn't that education should be expensive (my beekeeping journey cost me less than a few hundred Euro). But that education is far more than just putting theory in a brain.
Other examples are sports, art, crafts, cooking, music, acting, dancing, maintenance, building, gardening etc. lots of stuff that you can start in through YouTube. But that, in the end, requires fysical training, experience, and therefore at least guidance from experienced humans.
Ahh yes, the internet. Teaching babies about cursed Elsa, young children about alternative history, frustrated young men to blame women and minorities for their problem, and women that they will never be pretty enough without consuming product. Oh and the practically unlimited porn along all stages.
Crassness aside.
1. the internet is getting more and more pay walls too. So proper education isn't even free on the internet without months of curation.
2. People who make this claim must not have seen studies about homseschooled kids. That social element in being around a group of peers is crucial development that you can't really simulate anywhere else (without again, a crap ton of money for camps or something). Especially these days when everything is trying to isolate off.
there's perhaps something to be said for this argument: if you paid a lot of money for something you might be more motivated to use it wisely.
Also I can now get on the Internet and research jet engines or kidney transplants, but unless someone makes me learn the whole curriculum around it and then tests me to check if I understand, it's not worth much.
yeah, and also one's personal responsibility to make sure they are indeed learning and practicing.
implying i need to be dependent on a school to help me retain learning is a concept that is foreign to me. if i had that kind of dependency in my learning life, i'd be unemployed.
It’s never free. People in Europe say it is when they want to take a jab at the USA. But the reality is that earning potential is severely limited in Europe. And let’s not pretend that every degree obtained is beneficial to society. People get degrees with no marketable skills all the time. And the losses are distributed among all the taxpayers.
It’s not free, it’s paid by my taxes. I don’t get why you keep calling it that. That’s why we get paid less in the EU: subsidizing everything for everyone.
> due to "significant financial uncertainty" in higher education,
This is directly linked to the new Trump administration's policies. The university explicitly cites potential deep cuts to federal research funding, new tax legislation affecting endowment income, and ongoing concerns about rapid growth and escalating costs as primary reasons for this decision.
This move comes as Cornell and 11 other universities have filed a lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health over funding restrictions that could cost Cornell $80 million. The university's four-month hiring freeze coincides with similar measures at other prestigious institutions like Stanford, MIT, and Northwestern, all responding to the broader context of the Trump administration's proposals to eliminate the Department of Education and Executive Orders reducing scientific research funding.
This new US government is deeply hurting itself and destroying most valuable assets. Which it needs to compete against China or Europe.
> This move comes as Cornell and 11 other universities have filed a lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health over funding restrictions that could cost Cornell $80 million.
This is less than 0.75% of Cornell's endowment, so I'm not sure there is a strong case for causation here.
I think you may misunderstand how endowments work.
An endowment is a collection of funds that have been donated. Generally each donation is for furtherance of some specific aim that the donor wanted to promote.
Usually the terms of the donation are that the money should be managed to support the purpose for which it was donated in perpetuity. To implement that the managers of the endowment invest the money for long term growth, and use the earnings to go toward the purpose of the donation.
Cornell currently spends each year around 5% from their endowment, as do most other top schools.
Endowments are usually not used to make up unexpected shortfalls for at least 2 reasons:
1. They are already spending all they can consistent with supporting the various causes the donors donated in perpetuity.
2. Because the endowment is a collection of individual donations that were donated for different purposes there might not actually be anything in the endowment that can be used towards a particular shortfall.
> The pause best positions us, due to the increased level of review, to carefully and with due restraint, advance only those positions that are determined to be essential at this time.
Can't speak in regard to Cornell, but I think it's well past time to revoke the tax-exempt status of schools that rip students off with sky-high tuition while sitting on huge endowments. It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums.
My university jacked tuition 24% in one year; and when asked why, they essentially said "because everyone else did."
For this and other offensive behavior, I instructed them to never again ask me for a penny; and they haven't.
Let's say a University has $1m in the bank. In this case, they decide to use it to "endow" a "chaired professorship" to retain some top faculty member. The reason it works - the professor stays at said University - is because they give the professor the proceeds from the endowment (usually, this is like 5% expected rate of return, or in this case, $50k), which he/she uses for their research.
So now, should the University instead reallocate funds like that, thus (perhaps) losing top faculty, to (marginally) lower tuition?
Similarly, imagine a university raises millions of dollars for scholarships. Once again, they use the proceeds to fund the scholarships. Should they instead use the principal (as you're kind of suggesting), thus eventually running out of funds, or should they keep the endowment, and thus keep giving out scholarships?
Before condemning endowments, it would be better to first understand how they're being used. For example, if you found out that some large fraction was for student scholarships, would that change your position?
(to be clear, I'm not particularly on one side or the other here; I just think more nuanced positions are needed...)
Thanks for the reply and valid points. But I didn't say they should deplete the endowments; I'm saying that they are already garnering significant income from them (if they're large and invested competently).
And I still won't excuse raising tuitions sky-high "just because." And while I don't know the economics of athletic programs, screwing students while building three stadiums in a couple of decades isn't a good look.
> rip students off with sky-high tuition while sitting on huge endowments
As has been mentioned elsewhere, sitting on endowments is what you're supposed to do—you don't burn through the principal, you spend the interest. The point of an endowment is to provide a sustainable baseline income to keep the school going forever, it's not like an investment round where you're expected to use up the runway in an effort to reach profitability through other income streams.
> It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums.
Depending on which sports you're talking about and which schools, this might actually be an example of an investment that is expected to yield a return. At a lot of schools the sports programs subsidize the academics, so having a nice and roomy football stadium is actually a pretty sound investment into income streams that benefit everyone, even students with no interest in football.
>but I think it's well past time to revoke the tax-exempt status of schools that rip students off with sky-high tuition while sitting on huge endowments
As other people have mentioned in this thread, the point of endowments is to provide a steady source of income for the university's activities, not a piggy bank you can raid.
>It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums.
I'm sure the right is equally mad about universities "blowing money" on humanities programs as well. Should we get rid of those as well?
But you specifically advocated for stripping a university's non-profit status, partly on the basis of having an endowment. Therefore it's pretty reasonable to extrapolate that you don't like the concept of endowments, even if you're not explicitly advocating for depleting them.
>Not sure what you're on about with "the right" and "humanities programs."
The point is that the right like sport programs, but the left thinks they're boondoggles, and the left like humanities programs but the right thinks they're boondoggles. Getting rid of sports programs is a good way to piss off the right, and for them to defund humanities programs next time they're in power.
>Do "humanities programs" bring in loads of cash?
You'd rather than universities stop doing things that generate cash for their educational mission?
Check the top discussion for some perspective on what that really means. This barely covers two years of operation, funds have a lot of use restrictions by donors, and you can only spend cash once.
I'm more than aware of that. It gives one considerable flexibility however to have such a large fund. There is no suggestion in the discussions that the College will lose all of its other income, this would allow considerable time to weather and temporary storm
I was on the faculty at several schools, private, top 10, public, top 20, etc. Staff categorically does not include graduate students and post-docs, or teaching faculty. The staff expansion problem is the main problem facing academia. There is staff for handling day-to-day functioning of a department, they are usually over-worked and under-payed. This has not expanded and is not a problem.
The main problem is staff at the dean and above level. They are nebulous and their job functions rather diffuse. My impression is that appointments in those functions are with some frequency obtained through nepotism. Furthermore the staff in those functions is often highly ideological. Their true main function seems to bully faculty so that we are constantly "put in our place". The point is to shred to pieces the old principles of shared governance. Essentially they want to make us _their_ employees. If you don't believe me, I can expand on the various interactions that I had with such staff. An extreme example of this is the expansion of staff at UC's into faculty hiring, they now pre-sift all applications for ideological compliance first and then pass on the pre-sifted packet to the faculty.
Here is the staff that I am aware of and that I had the pleasure to interact with: Staff that handles disability accommodations (a large percentage of students are now officially "disabled" and use this disability to gain advantages when taking exams) , staff that is assigned to each student to handle their academic problems or advise them on which course to take (unnecessary they can just talk to faculty), staff that is in charge of Title IX (they don't do much and those departments employ pricey lawyers), staff that handles your grant submissions (their only useful function is making the difficult budget computations for the draconian shares that the university takes for itself, they also sometimes pester faculty about irrelevant things and refuse to submit the grant unless you satisfy them). 99% of the work of that staff is busy work and could be easily cut. I am sure their salaries are all in the 100+K categories. I 'd venture to say that if they are cut faculty would be made more efficient. I have also met staff that is in charge of basically nothing, they attend an enormous amount of committees and pushes for some "change" that never materializes. It is understood these days among the faculty that anybody who wants a real salary increase (but doesn't have the chops to get an external offer) needs to become part of that staff, usually in the form of some deanlet handling some obtuse issue. You probably see the problem.
In the meantime faculty is still performing all the critical functions: we serve on admission committees for graduate students, we serve on post-doc committees, we do the faculty interviews, we do the research, we teach the classes, but our salary increases are barely matched with inflation, essentially regardless of individual performance.
By the way, there is no justification for a hiring freeze in this environment where no real hardship has materialized yet. It is also theater since most hiring has concluded by now. It will be used as a justification to give me no increase this year, I am sure, while the endowment will grow. All of course will be blamed on the bad orange man in the white house.
> To ensure that we continue to thrive in an even more complex future, we must commit, across every part of our institution, to a sustainable budget today.
Are they implicitly admitting they have been living on an unsustainable budget so far?
Seeing other comments bringing up the numbers of staff vs students+faculty would suggest that’s the case…
Their budget is unsustainable in the same way that your budget is unsustainable if your boss cuts your pay. They have setup education and research programs based on decades of past funding, but that was unexpectedly subject to illegal reductions with the promise of permanent reductions, nothing like which has happened before and which is completely disconnected from any kind of economic necessity. It’s not like we had some kind of natural disaster or pandemic which actually shrunk the economy and tax revenue but simply a political power play trying to cancel perceived class enemies.
I’m so tired of this corporate jargon infecting academia. Universities used to value clarity, now they sound like HR memos. It’s the same playbook: bloat admin, cut actual workers, rebrand inefficiency as strategy.
Here is a 2024 article from the Stanford Daily: https://stanforddaily.com/2024/03/13/behind-stanfords-double...
In 1996: 13,811 students, 1488 faculty, 5881 total staff.
In 2024: 17,529 students, 2323 faculty, 16,527 total staff.
In 28 years: 27% increase in students 56% increase in faculty 281% increase in total staff
The ratio of staff to students is nearly 1:1
This is insane.
> "The ratio of staff to students is nearly 1:1"
> "This is insane."
"This expansion is largely at the School of Medicine, where the yearly staff growth rate of 5.6% is significantly higher than the 1.7% rate across the rest of the University...
School of Medicine spokesperson Courtney Lodato wrote that the increase largely includes clinical educators who teach and provide clinical care, financed by external research funds from government and industry sources"
Haven't seen anyone mention this yet: there is a difference between "listed employees" vs. "full time employees" (FTEs) vs. "full time employee equivalents" (FTEEs). In this very specific case, physicians/providers often work 0.125-0.875 (i.e. one hour to seven hours of an 8 hour day) for one entity (say, their primary teaching hospital), and the remainder for another entity (the university where they are also an listed as adjunct professor, etc.).
You could have 10,000 employees, however 4,000 of them are physicians/providers, 3,000 of whom work less than full time for that entity. So you are looking at 10,000 employees, but some number between 7,000 and 9,999 FTEEs. These are very different, and very relevant, numbers when looking at healthcare organizations.
Further detail from Stanford here: https://irds.stanford.edu/data-findings/staff-headcounts
"Methodology & Definitions Staff Headcount Staff headcounts include all regular, benefits-eligible university employees. With rare exceptions, employees must be appointed at 50% FTE (full-time equivalent) or more for at least six consecutive months in order to be eligible for benefits. The Professoriate and employees of SLAC are not included. Employees with multiple jobs are counted only in the job that is tied to their benefits, typically the one with the largest number of standard hours."
MIT 2024: 11,886 students. 17,490 Staff.
MIT Staff to student ratio: 1.47
No medical school.
The 17,490 number includes 4,500 Lincoln Lab staff. Backing those out. We get 12,990 MIT Staff.
So an MIT Staff to student ratio of: 1.09
https://facts.mit.edu/employees/ https://facts.mit.edu/lincoln-laboratory/
Still, 1:1? Please.
In the US, many Medical schools are schools only in the technical definition of schools. In reality they are more like research and medical centers that also do a bit of teaching on the side. Staff to students ratio could easily be in excess of 10:1
A little over a decade ago, I remember Dean of a top medical school I attended showing the budget of the medical school. Tuition was like 5% or of the entire med school revenue and budget. I remember raising my hand and asking the Dean if tuition was so little, why not just make it free. He gave me a death stare and just danced around the question.
How come the ratio was so much lower before? Could it be the (mostly useless) administrative positions?
The parenthetical is doing most of the lifting in that sentence.
It's also true. Source: one of my kids is in college right now.
The post you responded to was about how medical schools are “schools” in name only. You may be correct that administrators are useless, but your kid’s experience, assuming they are in medical school is not really evidence because they don’t see more than a sliver of what the school does (and needs to do, by law).
In this case, you've been refuted by an explanation that the growth is almost entirely at the school of medicine, and most of that increase has been in staff that are providing care. And you're continuing to advance the point anyways.
I mean, if you tack on a hospital to a university, the correct denominator to compare against is "patients served," not "students educated," at least for the portion of the headcount you're sticking in the numerator.
Hospitals attached to universities aren't in general "tacked on" but are a part of the educational environment. They exist not only to serve patients but to educate students.
No, of course, but is the primary focus of the bulk of the staff educational or patient care? Seems disingenuous to pretend it's the former just to make a point.
Total staff numbers are only marginally useful without further breakdown, as that article points out.
A family member works for an eatery at a large university. Technically they are employees (staff) of the university, but pretty much in name only. They work for a business unit which receives no financial support from the university. They are profitable on their own and if they aren’t, they would close down. They are provided benefits via the university, but it is part of their budget. Including them in the count relative to students is about as useful as including the employees of the (independent) Starbucks on campus.
(It’s not Stanford, so I can’t speak to that specific institution)
What is "staff"? Is there a break down on how much "staff" is involved in research tasks vs admin tasks? Research nowadays is complex and requires a lot of technical support, a lot of people who are hired as technical-administrative stuff may do actually purely research tasks [0]. As usually faculty captures people in some "professorship" level, it completely misses this big crowd of research-related work.
[0] source: me
Externally funded research also come with many compliance, reporting, and other requirements [1]. Administrative staff are the ones who handle these responsibilities. If funding agencies want fewer administrators, require less oversight.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-2/subtitle-A/chapter-II/p...
It might be insane, if you believe that "staff" are all doing administrative duties. But, as was pointed out, "staff" are often anyone who is not a tenure track faculty. So librarians, research technicians, environmental health and safety, IT support, etc etc.
A more useful comparison would divide staff into "supported by tuition" (should be related to student count) and "supported by external grants and clinical income".
This idea that costs have increased because of administrative staff expansion is a popular one, but one that ignores what R1 universities spend money on, and where that money comes from. (Ironically, I suspect that the university may be spending more money on research, because of limits on indirect costs.)
I think, however, the total count is extremely important.
Every University’s purported mission is to educate students and advance our collective knowledge together with its students.
That’s it.
If the university makes more money from treating patients than teaching its students, then its mission can’t help but shift.
Likewise if the bulk of the staff are not focused on teaching and educating, then its mission can’t help but shift.
This is a problem.
> Every University’s purported mission is to educate students and advance our > collective knowledge together with its students.
> That’s it.
Not if the university has a medical school. Virtually all R1 universities with medical schools have a hospital, and a large clinical practice. Most of medical school is an apprenticeship where you treat patients. Medical schools need patients, which means a lot of additional staff.
Likewise, in most fields it is no longer possible to advance knowledge just by going to the library or writing on a white board. Knowledge is advanced through experimentation, and experimental equipment and reagents cost money, and need staff to use and maintain them.
No university (and certainly no medical school), makes enough money in tuition and fees to pay for the education provided, and I seriously doubt that many universities have supported themselves solely through tuition since the beginning of the universities in the middle ages.
You are certainly correct that university deans and presidents have seen their mission shift with the increasing cost of education, and indeed faculty are writing many more grants than they did 75 years ago. So time commitments have shifted. But there is an implication that it could have been some other way -- that the money is there (or could have been there) if some other path were chosen. It is hard for me to imagine where the money might have come from.
> 281% increase in total staff
Nit: 181% increase
I do wonder what percentage of said "staff" are really just students working to fulfill student responsibility[1] for pennies on the dollar.
[1] https://financialaid.stanford.edu/undergrad/how/student.html
from the article you linked:
> Stanford also has unique characteristics that create high staff headcount, former Provost Persis Drell told the Faculty Senate during a May 2023 meeting: Unlike other institutions, Stanford requires more staff to maintain Stanford Research Park, a large housing portfolio and other facilities.
from one of the sources [0] that paragraph linked to:
> It’s also important to understand how Stanford defines terms used in headcount growth since those definitions vary widely among research universities, Drell noted. For example, clinician educators, which have grown significantly in number, are categorized as “staff” at Stanford, while at other universities they are often counted as “faculty.” In addition, and in contrast to many other institutions, Stanford has chosen to focus more on hiring staff in many areas rather than using outside contractors whose employees would not count as Stanford staff.
and from [1] also linked in the above paragraph:
> We recognize that stable, affordable housing is critical for student success. Stanford guarantees housing for undergraduates for all four years and provides housing for over 70% of graduate students. We also provide as much as three times more student housing than large universities across California in similarly constrained housing markets.
given the context, it seems perfectly reasonable that Stanford would have more "staff" employees than the University of Southwestern North Dakota, even normalized for different numbers of student enrollment.
0: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2023/05/provost-provides-d...
1: https://housinginfo.stanford.edu/by-the-numbers
This is also the fallacy of looking at one metric.
Do staff include productive researchers producing net positive incoming?
Other comments mention the medical school. Are these staff providing patient care (and billing insurance)?
University staff aren’t necessarily just your traditional educators. A whole lot of productive stuff (both for the university and everyone else) can potentially benefit from “staff.”
Universities run small cities. That staff number includes the people who mow the lawn, cook food, clean dorms, work security, maintain their networks, etc the list is massive.
it's more like a resort than a city, which is the problem.
This seems like a low-value comment without some data. For example, can you identify the specific jobs which you consider resort-like and how much of the growth they contribute to?
Without knowing more about the numbers, the only one I have an issue with is the number of students. These universities should be doing everything they can to increase enrollment and let in more students.
I went to a smaller school in my city, but at the time most everyone I know who applied got it. I would not get it today, and people end up wait listed, etc... IMO, that is the failing of the US higher education system. Next is cost to the student.
virtually every sector of the economy has 'excess staff;' it is not confined to higher ed. It's the obvious conclusion of decades of automation not being realized as less working hours, but in the dilution of responsibilities into more complicated and larger corporate apparatuses. Some of them are called "bullshit jobs" some of them are given credibility, while being utterly purposeless ultimately. This is largely ignored as a general trend because it is usually contextualized to a narrative within each company (as is the case here) rather than seen as a larger phenomenon.
This is the inevitable conclusion of unprecedented concentration of capital, which is not new but only being revealed during a time of seemingly limitless automation potential.
What does the non-faculty staff does? Is it maybe connected to technical staff? They Can’t all be management?
Janitorial, technical, nutritional … basically anyone not involved in educating students “non-faculty.”
So including people performing a big chunk of essential research tasks and who do not fall into the "professor" or "student" category.
Didn't those already exist before? Is there lot more of that type of work? Or shouldn't it be done more efficiently now? Also aren't those increasingly out-sourced so shouldn't count in that stat?
I would assume non-student TAs (who do teach students), lab technical staff (who maintain equipment and and more directly enable teaching than janitorial staff) and such are also all non-staff.
Non-student TAs are typically grad students whose research lab lacks research assistant funding.
Universities try to hire grad students as TAs to help them out, but sometimes hire outsiders as TAs. It could be because the undergrad major has lots of students but the corresponding graduate major has few.
Obviously this varies from university to university and I know nothing about Cornell.
>I would assume non-student TAs (who do teach students), lab technical staff (who maintain equipment and and more directly enable teaching than janitorial staff) and such are also all non-staff.
They are considered staff.
Sorry. I did mean they are staff, and that they are "necessary" staff for the core function of teaching.
We might need to know the FTE values to understand what this means. Are staff positions full-time FTE? Are faculty positions full-time, tenure positions? Have they added part-time staff, adjunct faculty, etc.?
The other insane thing is 10 students to one teacher? I don't understand that because when I went to SJSU, I was almost always in a class with 60+. For CS, it was around 30 people in the room.
Did you consider what happens to the ratio when students take more than one class ?
When I was in college (25 years ago) classes were either 5-15 people or 400+; nothing in between.
How much has the endowment increased?
It could also just mean they do more research and less education. But hey, let's quickly jump to conclusions, that seems to be a popular hobby nowadays.
So you're saying the ratio has improved? An education improving their ratio of faculty to students seems like a good thing.
Aren't all the big bad billionaires self-made autodidacts?
Most people aren't. Most people benefit from education. If there are unlimited AGI educators, that seems like an extraordinary claim and I haven't even seen a pilot. Is the plan to move fast and break education? Cause that seems kind of extreme rather than any sort of conservative I've ever known.
Do you just want to destroy those posh academic institutions? Or are the billionaires offering to subsidize education with donations by increasing taxes on themselves?
Or you don't realize that "faculty" can include researchers?
I'm confused. Can you clarify?
Contemporary academia especially in the West has a massive surplus of staff.
Many people pursue academic careers solely for a comfortable lifestyle, doing minimal or even no research for long period of time. With extra lack of oversight that allows researchers to isolate themselves they create circles which cover each other.
Occasionally, folks outside of the circle come in and they start finding ton of fraud in the research with multiple big cases in past few years on top universities like Harvard for example.
Wow, experts in academic careers are contributing here. Can you please give us a source of your knowledge of why people pursue academic careers?
"Many people pursue academic careers solely for a comfortable lifestyle, doing minimal or even no research for long period of time. With extra lack of oversight that allows researchers to isolate themselves they create circles which cover each other."
I want what you're smoking because that might be one of the biggest fabrications I've heard in a long time.
> Many people pursue academic careers solely for a comfortable lifestyle, doing minimal or even no research for long period of time.
do you have any concrete evidence (that is not based on vibes, anecdotes, or "everyone knows") to support this claim?
What fraud happened at Harvard?
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/8/3/hbs-prof-lawsuit...
If you search “Harvard research fraud” at least three distinct cases come up.
I found 2. One is an ongoing lawsuit and the other seems mostly like stupidity because people keep falling for the stupid AI grift. I can barely trust AI to produce basic boilerplate and they are trying to verify novel research with it?
Cornell has an endowment of 10.7 billion dollars. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024/10/university-endowmen...
You don’t spent an endowment, you spend the interest. The entire research budget comes from outside funding. In Cornell’s case, the research funding amounts to $1B a year.
Just for perspective, the annual research budget of a university I looked at the numbers for recently (not Cornell, but R1) would go through that in less than two decades, even if it were completely dedicated to research and nothing else.
You're assuming they won't make any money on licensing or investments. Which they most certainly will.
Tech transfer is an important function, however, tech transfer offices outside perhaps the top 15 or 20 in the US (public and private) are not profitable in terms of dollars. AUTM (tech transfer trade group) has extensive data on the subject.
Still I can't work up a tear for universities with large endowments when the top 10 universities sit pretty on 304 billion dollars out of 840 billion total, while charging insane and exponentially rising tuition fees.
and you're assuming they invest like you do in your 401k or whatever. which they most certainly don't. some are more aggressive w.r.t. private markets investment but many focus on capital preservation and don't grow as much as you'd expect. FY24 Cornell's endowment returned something like 8%. this despite an S&P500 gain of, what, 23% ish.
institutions and allocators operate with a very different mindset versus individuals or hedgies.
No, I'm assuming they will seed invest into startups based on technologies they license.
With an optimistic 10% annual return, this would amount to 1/5 of Cornell's budget.
then they need to find some cuts because Uncle Sam has a maxed out credit card and can't keep making up the difference whether he wants to or not
Uncle Sam doesn’t have a credit limit: Uncle Sam has chosen to take on debt so rich people can avoid paying taxes. If we had rich people pay at the same rates they paid a few decades ago, didn’t have caps on the maximum amount of taxable income for social security, etc. we could return to the balanced budget we had at the turn of the century before the Republicans lowered taxes for the express political goal of forcing program cuts.
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Can you really not think of any ways that our economy is different from those? For example, were either of them the largest economy in the world operating the global benchmark currency? Were their debts voluntary, incurred solely to allow the richest people to pay less in taxes?
Do you honestly believe that either of those two examples are actually comparable to the USA’s credit status?
Sovereign debt is not the same as your household budget.
Uncle Sam is intending to go even further into debt for tax cuts.
How about Uncle Sam starts taking money back from rich people instead of foisting more debt on workers and slashing my benefits so that they can buy another yacht?
And according to the same text, $5.8B in annual operating costs.
And what? You know that for example endowment funds have restrictions on what they can be spent on.
This is really victim blaming. I would not have an issue if the government has said that for future grant rounds there will be limits on overheads, but this lot just decided they cut already agreed and planned budgets and no matter the consequences.
Reminder that endowments are highly illiquid and typically are not used to fund budgets
What should they be used for the ?
Universities use the interest and dividends to pay for operating expenses.
Actually drawing down the fund would just ruin future finances.
I believe most endowments have conditions. So whatever the donator say?
Used? The university is what is used to grow the endowment.
So what's the point of the endowment then? To make the green numbers go up?
To be invested and generate returns which can fund the university's programs. As I said in another comment, it's a long-term investment, not a spending fund. You don't eat your seed corn.
endowments are the tail wagging the dog in many educational institutions
that's just misinformation.
> In particular, the endowment supports roughly two-thirds of the budget for undergraduate and graduate financial aid, as well as a significant portion of faculty salaries, research, and key programs like libraries and student services.
from https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/02/staff-hiring
The returns from the endowment are used to support university programs. The endowment itself is not spent - it's a long-term investment which produces dividends, not a spending fund.
Universities will dip into endowment funds if the returns are worse than expected. They will pretty much never make plans to dip into endowment funds, though.
Yeah, $500M (a 5% return) is still a lot of money.
To add, money is fungible. $100 for one department just means that $100 is freed up for a different department.
Money in university budgets is most certainly not fungible. Endowments are for the most part directed for specific uses and cannot be used outside of the restrictions. Education and General (E&G, terminology varies between institutions) includes tuition (only part of the yearly budget) and cannot be used for research. Unrestricted funds are as rare as hens teeth and doubly so outside upper admin.
The “color of money” is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of university admin but explains so much about how things operate.
It only matters if the restricted money covers more than what it's intended for.
If you have 500M allowed to cover education and require 700M total for it, then the restriction doesn't matter at all.
The government should levy an 80% tax on this and use it to pay for student loan forgiveness.
To be fair, I hear the Ivies have extremely generous scholarships (probably amortized by the nepotism acceptances). Much fewer people of financial need are graduating these schools in massive debt.
What percentage of college students attend Ivies?
Other institutions are also following the lead: MIT [0], Stanford [1], North Carolina State [2], UCSD [3], and perhaps there will be many others.
[0]: https://hr.mit.edu/jobs
[1]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/02/staff-hiring
[2]: https://www.wral.com/news/education/nc-state-hiring-freeze-f...
[3]: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/02/20/uc-san-diego...
Not going to lie, I felt the 2025 market would get worse but never thought to have "(potential) mass government layoff" on my bingo card.
What are unemployed people even finding these days? Is everyone just giving in to the gig economy? Sadly my car is definitely on its last legs (probably saved by the pandemic) so I don't know how long it'd last if I did Doordash/Uber
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On topic, it's a shame even an Ivy League is feeling a result of this economy and administration. What does that say about any other public school? Is post-secondary education going to collapse?
It's all about the choices. Post secondary schools had easy money (student loans, grants, expanding endowments) and rapidly expanding enrollment for decades. It seems many schools thought that would continue, but we saw enrollment plateau and even decrease. Ivy schools have options - lower prestige to increase enrollment, or lean on prestige and endowments to raise prices. Other schools will likely cut staff/services and increase class sizes. I went to a state school and their enrollment has dropped 25% since I was there. It seems tuition went up, state funding per student is higher (not sure if total is the same or higher), some upgrades were put off, and some services seem to have been scaled back.
> Ivy schools have options - lower prestige to increase enrollment, or lean on prestige and endowments to raise prices.
Ivies aren’t dependent on tuition at all. All have need-blind admissions and most offer full rides to anyone accepted who couldn’t pay otherwise. Penn just updated its income thresholds to provide guaranteed full tuition scholarships to families earning less than 200k a year and budgeted over $300m/year to cover it. These aren’t the box-top Us you’re looking for.
Based on history, ivy schools have substantially increased enrollment to bolster endowment, so it seems that's the track they're taking.
> I felt the 2025 market would get worse but never thought to have "(potential) mass government layoff" on my bingo card.
I'm curious if this is because you never heard about what was in Project 2025, or didn't think Trump would win, or didn't think he would enact it?
I learned from 2016 and didn't discount the idea of Trump winning again. I just didn't think he'd enact it. He'd be blocked by properly smart people who realize across the board that "this will impact my money".
And to be fair some smart people (in the courts) are blocking it. I just didn't think so many illegal actions in the course of a month would escalate this far without. It makes Nixon look like the Dali Lhama.
Same at Stanford https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/02/staff-hiring
As well as MIT https://hr.mit.edu/jobs
How are the ivy leagues NOT financially independent? People claw/cheat/do whatever it takes to get in. Ivy's employ some of the best raw IQ people we have. Endowment funds over years should blossom.
Could they be so smart to 'redline', to maximally extract as much funds from the Gov as possible while also pumping up their investments? Or might they not have managed funds well enough and truly cannot afford things?
if scenario 1) refactor expenses, pass an audit, and make a plan to build up funds. return to 75% prior budget levels
if scenario 2) refactor expenses, pass an audit, and make a plan to build up funds. return to 25% prior budget levels
*in both cases we need to remove regulations on schools so they can fire all the admin (they claim to need to keep up legally inane wild things) and pay the professors/researchers more.
Colleges and Universities are already on a downward trend; the perfect storm of declining enrollment/population numbers and AI potentially wiping out what they offer. Colleges and University were meant to be a special protected Eunuch class studying 'the dark arts', but they've publicly become known havens of scheming Eunuchs trying to overthrow the emperor. Too close to the sun
I assume they, like most orgs, make a planning based on some available budget. If the budget gets higher, they will expand. If it gets lower, they will reduce their expenses/spread. I also assume that the reduction of overhead in particular is gonna hurt such institutions _a lot_ because they have exactly planned based on that.
I cannot speak about Cornell specifically, I do not know if they have a bloated administration or superfluous expenses. But the truth is that admin stuff are necessary for supporting education and research. Having been in universities during admin reforms reducing admin stuff (claiming that they make "smart restructuring") it always negatively affects work done in the university in one way or another. Usually, it means that research staff will have to pick up some of the admin work themselves, or be offered less support doing it. As research staff are usually paid more than admin stuff, that is not necessarily effective (unless it is assumed that research stuff will be working overtime anyway). In any case, it does not seem like an efficient move most of the times, even if it seems so to the bureaucrats who make these plans.
I imagine they are, but they will still have some mindset of a business and cut spending in lieu of economic headwinds. Like pretty much every industry in the last few years.
I think the ivies will be fine. It's 99% of other universities without 10b in endowments I'm worried about.
you got the academic and economics right. but ignored the politics. academic politics is very exclusive... and the circle in it owns lots of capital. so when capital goes on strike, they fall in line.
While I understand that people have their problems with universities tuition and loans ..etc. The problem is here is that funding for basic and applied science on all front is being cut. It does provide a lot of jobs and supports a lot of universities operations too. Universities build labs which does provide infrastructure (buildings and other facilities) and NSF, NIH and DOE provide funds to use these facilities to pursue research. So these agencies have dependency on universities to provide these research facilities and manage hiring and compliance with rules.
Now there are many problems with current system which need to be addressed. But you don't solve the cancer in the cells by killing cells and thus killing patient. But you use targeted approach to the problem. This needs some modifications to the rules and deep changes in laws that will require further study and discussion. This is of course not going to happen currently.
Now some people argue that the budget is a problem and debt and deficit is more important. But again lets talk data. The whole NSF and NIH budget is less than $60B dollars in 2024 which amounts to a little bit less than 1% of the total budget. If you compare it with other Items in the budget percentage wise you will get (DoD - 7.5%), (Medicare - 6.7%), (Social Security - 4.6%), (Medicaid - 10%),(National Debt Interest - 15%). So even cutting it all will not achieve any significant improvement while create a lot of problems. There are a significant part of economy and jobs are supported by these money. The return on investment is positive in most cases and you are leading in innovation and most of scientific frontier. One can argue that these two items are very cheap to maintain you dominance than another couple of air craft carriers (and their operation costs).
If you tried and achieved any reduction in the big items in the federal budget you will be saving something near the total budget of NIH and NSF. But again for some reason a lot of focus on these programs while less focus on big items for some reason.
My working theory is that wage growth was getting to be too much for the corporations so flooding the market with candidates is meant to counteract that.
Not mentioned -- Cornell has an $11bn endowment that can be tapped to make up some of the shortfall. Any issues with Federal funding will be hurting smaller schools and schools with smaller endowments way before hurting Cornell.
For context on the Cornell numbers with breakdowns on revenue and expenditure, here's Cornell's page on:
Operating Budget: Sources and Uses: https://finance.cornell.edu/financial-guide/operating-budget...
Operating Capital Budget Plan (PDF): https://dbp.cornell.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/FY-2024-O...
Consolidated Financial Statement: (PDF): https://finance.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/cornell-fina...
From pg 45 of CFS, compensation and benefits is definitely Cornell's largest category. Instruction and Healthcare services making up about $1.3B each.
Instruction, student services and academic support: $1,336,694 Research: $481,268 Public service: $108,197 Healthcare services: $1,339,074 Institutional support: $539,278 Enterprises and subsidiaries: $146,630
Total Compensation and benefits: $3,951,141
If anything in any country should be free, it should be education. And, obviously, the administration of education should never be a for-profit venture.
Valuing democracy and being able to select sensible leaders depends on it.
>If anything in any country should be free, it should be education.
I can't tell you're being serious or you're being hyperbolic for the sake of defending education. Most people, given the choice would rather get free food, water, or healthcare.
Where I come [1] from, they would prefer education over everything else .
Material benefits or wealth can be stolen away on the whim of the stronger party, as history has proven over and over again.
No one can steal my education however.
—-
[1] This is a thing both the strong and weaker groups understood very well for over 3000 years. Who could learn which skills and therefore do what job is what the caste system was all about .
Teachers were and are considered only step below God, your teachers commands supersede even those of parents . Stories like those of ekalavya are venerated for a reason.
The power of knowledge and education was well understood and also closely guarded to create and manage oppression for thousands of years
If anything in any country should be free, it should be education.
It's called The Internet.
There's so much that you cannot learn from the Internet, but must practiced, coached, steered, etc. That needs fysical things to interact with. That need teams, colleagues, or other humans.
People who think you can learn "everything" from the Internet have a very limited view of "everything". And could probably learn about the world by going out there ;)
I've learned a lot more from YouTube videos than anything else, and even without archive.org there's all the other shadow libraries I can get books from.
But sure, keep telling yourself that your overpriced "education" is worth anything in this era of truly massive information access.
Amongst all the things I have learned last decades is Beekeeping.
Yes, I watched online video. Read books, blogs etc.
But the true learning was done as apprentice with a few experienced beekeepers.
Beekeeping is only a part theory. There's a big part of practice. From training precise and calm hand movements to how to properly tucking in your vest to listening, feeling, and reading bees mood.
My point isn't that education should be expensive (my beekeeping journey cost me less than a few hundred Euro). But that education is far more than just putting theory in a brain.
Other examples are sports, art, crafts, cooking, music, acting, dancing, maintenance, building, gardening etc. lots of stuff that you can start in through YouTube. But that, in the end, requires fysical training, experience, and therefore at least guidance from experienced humans.
autodidacts existed before youtube
Ahh yes, the internet. Teaching babies about cursed Elsa, young children about alternative history, frustrated young men to blame women and minorities for their problem, and women that they will never be pretty enough without consuming product. Oh and the practically unlimited porn along all stages.
Crassness aside.
1. the internet is getting more and more pay walls too. So proper education isn't even free on the internet without months of curation.
2. People who make this claim must not have seen studies about homseschooled kids. That social element in being around a group of peers is crucial development that you can't really simulate anywhere else (without again, a crap ton of money for camps or something). Especially these days when everything is trying to isolate off.
there's perhaps something to be said for this argument: if you paid a lot of money for something you might be more motivated to use it wisely.
Also I can now get on the Internet and research jet engines or kidney transplants, but unless someone makes me learn the whole curriculum around it and then tests me to check if I understand, it's not worth much.
and then tests me to check if I understand
That's what interviews are for.
yeah, and also one's personal responsibility to make sure they are indeed learning and practicing.
implying i need to be dependent on a school to help me retain learning is a concept that is foreign to me. if i had that kind of dependency in my learning life, i'd be unemployed.
It’s never free. People in Europe say it is when they want to take a jab at the USA. But the reality is that earning potential is severely limited in Europe. And let’s not pretend that every degree obtained is beneficial to society. People get degrees with no marketable skills all the time. And the losses are distributed among all the taxpayers.
It costs someone something, but no one their freedom. Mass ignorance is the opposite.
As for degrees with no use, pretty sure these are the byproducts of education for profit, with heavy marketing passing as administrative expense.
Maybe you could divide the system in two halves: 1) Of national interest, 2) Discretionary.
As for earning potential, it has nothing to do with free education, as so many high-earners in the US were educated by such systems.
It’s not free, it’s paid by my taxes. I don’t get why you keep calling it that. That’s why we get paid less in the EU: subsidizing everything for everyone.
> due to "significant financial uncertainty" in higher education,
This is directly linked to the new Trump administration's policies. The university explicitly cites potential deep cuts to federal research funding, new tax legislation affecting endowment income, and ongoing concerns about rapid growth and escalating costs as primary reasons for this decision.
This move comes as Cornell and 11 other universities have filed a lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health over funding restrictions that could cost Cornell $80 million. The university's four-month hiring freeze coincides with similar measures at other prestigious institutions like Stanford, MIT, and Northwestern, all responding to the broader context of the Trump administration's proposals to eliminate the Department of Education and Executive Orders reducing scientific research funding.
This new US government is deeply hurting itself and destroying most valuable assets. Which it needs to compete against China or Europe.
> This move comes as Cornell and 11 other universities have filed a lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health over funding restrictions that could cost Cornell $80 million.
This is less than 0.75% of Cornell's endowment, so I'm not sure there is a strong case for causation here.
I think you may misunderstand how endowments work.
An endowment is a collection of funds that have been donated. Generally each donation is for furtherance of some specific aim that the donor wanted to promote.
Usually the terms of the donation are that the money should be managed to support the purpose for which it was donated in perpetuity. To implement that the managers of the endowment invest the money for long term growth, and use the earnings to go toward the purpose of the donation.
Cornell currently spends each year around 5% from their endowment, as do most other top schools.
Endowments are usually not used to make up unexpected shortfalls for at least 2 reasons:
1. They are already spending all they can consistent with supporting the various causes the donors donated in perpetuity.
2. Because the endowment is a collection of individual donations that were donated for different purposes there might not actually be anything in the endowment that can be used towards a particular shortfall.
What is Cornell's endowment used for? Edit: Also: Who were the donors? What restrictions did they place on their donation?
> The pause best positions us, due to the increased level of review, to carefully and with due restraint, advance only those positions that are determined to be essential at this time.
What twisted mind concocted this sentence?
From the sound of it, a whole bunch of them.
I worry that every penny saved will fuel an unnecessary war
What does Cornell's 10 billion dollar endowment pay for?
It produces about 900 million in interest to run Cornell.
apparently that only accounts for less than 20% of the operating budget:
https://dbp.cornell.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/FY25-Oper...
Can't speak in regard to Cornell, but I think it's well past time to revoke the tax-exempt status of schools that rip students off with sky-high tuition while sitting on huge endowments. It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums.
My university jacked tuition 24% in one year; and when asked why, they essentially said "because everyone else did."
For this and other offensive behavior, I instructed them to never again ask me for a penny; and they haven't.
Let's say a University has $1m in the bank. In this case, they decide to use it to "endow" a "chaired professorship" to retain some top faculty member. The reason it works - the professor stays at said University - is because they give the professor the proceeds from the endowment (usually, this is like 5% expected rate of return, or in this case, $50k), which he/she uses for their research.
So now, should the University instead reallocate funds like that, thus (perhaps) losing top faculty, to (marginally) lower tuition?
Similarly, imagine a university raises millions of dollars for scholarships. Once again, they use the proceeds to fund the scholarships. Should they instead use the principal (as you're kind of suggesting), thus eventually running out of funds, or should they keep the endowment, and thus keep giving out scholarships?
Before condemning endowments, it would be better to first understand how they're being used. For example, if you found out that some large fraction was for student scholarships, would that change your position?
(to be clear, I'm not particularly on one side or the other here; I just think more nuanced positions are needed...)
Thanks for the reply and valid points. But I didn't say they should deplete the endowments; I'm saying that they are already garnering significant income from them (if they're large and invested competently).
And I still won't excuse raising tuitions sky-high "just because." And while I don't know the economics of athletic programs, screwing students while building three stadiums in a couple of decades isn't a good look.
> rip students off with sky-high tuition while sitting on huge endowments
As has been mentioned elsewhere, sitting on endowments is what you're supposed to do—you don't burn through the principal, you spend the interest. The point of an endowment is to provide a sustainable baseline income to keep the school going forever, it's not like an investment round where you're expected to use up the runway in an effort to reach profitability through other income streams.
> It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums.
Depending on which sports you're talking about and which schools, this might actually be an example of an investment that is expected to yield a return. At a lot of schools the sports programs subsidize the academics, so having a nice and roomy football stadium is actually a pretty sound investment into income streams that benefit everyone, even students with no interest in football.
Valid points, but I didn't say deplete the endowments. And I am curious about the economics of sports programs and exactly where the proceeds go.
>but I think it's well past time to revoke the tax-exempt status of schools that rip students off with sky-high tuition while sitting on huge endowments
As other people have mentioned in this thread, the point of endowments is to provide a steady source of income for the university's activities, not a piggy bank you can raid.
>It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums.
I'm sure the right is equally mad about universities "blowing money" on humanities programs as well. Should we get rid of those as well?
How convenient. Call money something else to continue ripping people off.
Is your implication that non-profits shouldn't be able to keep money on hand and should spend anything they have saved ASAP?
I never said to deplete the endowments.
Not sure what you're on about with "the right" and "humanities programs." Do "humanities programs" bring in loads of cash?
>I never said to deplete the endowments.
But you specifically advocated for stripping a university's non-profit status, partly on the basis of having an endowment. Therefore it's pretty reasonable to extrapolate that you don't like the concept of endowments, even if you're not explicitly advocating for depleting them.
>Not sure what you're on about with "the right" and "humanities programs."
The point is that the right like sport programs, but the left thinks they're boondoggles, and the left like humanities programs but the right thinks they're boondoggles. Getting rid of sports programs is a good way to piss off the right, and for them to defund humanities programs next time they're in power.
>Do "humanities programs" bring in loads of cash?
You'd rather than universities stop doing things that generate cash for their educational mission?
I'm not convinced that the cash is really serving their "educational mission."
From the article
> Together with all of American higher education, Cornell is entering a time of significant financial uncertainty
From Wikipedia
>As of 2024, Cornell University has an endowment of $10.7 billion
Check the top discussion for some perspective on what that really means. This barely covers two years of operation, funds have a lot of use restrictions by donors, and you can only spend cash once.
I'm more than aware of that. It gives one considerable flexibility however to have such a large fund. There is no suggestion in the discussions that the College will lose all of its other income, this would allow considerable time to weather and temporary storm
I was on the faculty at several schools, private, top 10, public, top 20, etc. Staff categorically does not include graduate students and post-docs, or teaching faculty. The staff expansion problem is the main problem facing academia. There is staff for handling day-to-day functioning of a department, they are usually over-worked and under-payed. This has not expanded and is not a problem.
The main problem is staff at the dean and above level. They are nebulous and their job functions rather diffuse. My impression is that appointments in those functions are with some frequency obtained through nepotism. Furthermore the staff in those functions is often highly ideological. Their true main function seems to bully faculty so that we are constantly "put in our place". The point is to shred to pieces the old principles of shared governance. Essentially they want to make us _their_ employees. If you don't believe me, I can expand on the various interactions that I had with such staff. An extreme example of this is the expansion of staff at UC's into faculty hiring, they now pre-sift all applications for ideological compliance first and then pass on the pre-sifted packet to the faculty.
Here is the staff that I am aware of and that I had the pleasure to interact with: Staff that handles disability accommodations (a large percentage of students are now officially "disabled" and use this disability to gain advantages when taking exams) , staff that is assigned to each student to handle their academic problems or advise them on which course to take (unnecessary they can just talk to faculty), staff that is in charge of Title IX (they don't do much and those departments employ pricey lawyers), staff that handles your grant submissions (their only useful function is making the difficult budget computations for the draconian shares that the university takes for itself, they also sometimes pester faculty about irrelevant things and refuse to submit the grant unless you satisfy them). 99% of the work of that staff is busy work and could be easily cut. I am sure their salaries are all in the 100+K categories. I 'd venture to say that if they are cut faculty would be made more efficient. I have also met staff that is in charge of basically nothing, they attend an enormous amount of committees and pushes for some "change" that never materializes. It is understood these days among the faculty that anybody who wants a real salary increase (but doesn't have the chops to get an external offer) needs to become part of that staff, usually in the form of some deanlet handling some obtuse issue. You probably see the problem.
In the meantime faculty is still performing all the critical functions: we serve on admission committees for graduate students, we serve on post-doc committees, we do the faculty interviews, we do the research, we teach the classes, but our salary increases are barely matched with inflation, essentially regardless of individual performance.
By the way, there is no justification for a hiring freeze in this environment where no real hardship has materialized yet. It is also theater since most hiring has concluded by now. It will be used as a justification to give me no increase this year, I am sure, while the endowment will grow. All of course will be blamed on the bad orange man in the white house.
> To ensure that we continue to thrive in an even more complex future, we must commit, across every part of our institution, to a sustainable budget today.
Are they implicitly admitting they have been living on an unsustainable budget so far?
Seeing other comments bringing up the numbers of staff vs students+faculty would suggest that’s the case…
Their budget is unsustainable in the same way that your budget is unsustainable if your boss cuts your pay. They have setup education and research programs based on decades of past funding, but that was unexpectedly subject to illegal reductions with the promise of permanent reductions, nothing like which has happened before and which is completely disconnected from any kind of economic necessity. It’s not like we had some kind of natural disaster or pandemic which actually shrunk the economy and tax revenue but simply a political power play trying to cancel perceived class enemies.
They had a sustainable budget, but the government decided to cut already agreed budgets.
I’m so tired of this corporate jargon infecting academia. Universities used to value clarity, now they sound like HR memos. It’s the same playbook: bloat admin, cut actual workers, rebrand inefficiency as strategy.
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