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Penn is rescinding some PhD offers as part of cuts to graduate programs in light of DOGE funding changes. Vandy, USC, and Pitt are pausing PhD admissions for now, which feels slightly more reasonable than rescinding.
It's interesting that the cuts are occurring to the "next generation" of incoming talent, although it somewhat makes sense - Penn PhDs are funded, with very nice stipends. Rescinding is still a big move, though, when Penn could cut administrative bloat or decrease the full funding such that potential candidates decide not to join the program in the first place. The whole point of the Ivy, I mean, Ivory Tower is to strengthen their own prestige and little robots, so rescinding feels weird. There's also the ability to dip into the endowment, but I know that gets complicated fast.
I am also wondering how they're deciding who to rescind from. Are any international future students getting the boot? Are there DEI level decisions being made after the fact, as a way of getting around affirmative action? Are they going to change their minds if funding frees up if lawsuits throw down or the DOGE pause ends?
I'm a law student, and firms talk a lot about lessons learned from the financial crisis. An entire "generation" of talent was lost from cutting start classes during the crisis, and firms really feel it now - it had longer term impacts down the road to not just take the financial hit of having a few new associates bumbling around. I wonder if academia is about to undergo the same learning experience?
Or will academia, particularly STEM, turn to embrace private funding more thoroughly? Private influence in STEM academic research could increase innovation and development, and solve the "funding crisis" presented from the withdrawal of government funds. The influence of private interests in nonprofits/educational institutions is an old culture war argument, but one that might start playing out among graduate programs.
It's also interesting that undergraduate programs, for now, aren't getting hit. Maybe they're more lucrative/cash cows, although many are moving to full need-based funding. Maybe it's the demographic cliff.
Naturally, universities like Penn, Vanderbilt, USC, and Pitt would rather take out cost-cutting on graduate students and faculty than administration and staff. A combination of malicious compliance and self-interest—it reminds me of those graphs that show the growth in number of administration and staff far outpacing the growth in faculty and students over the past few decades.
It makes for a good sob story that Orange Man is rug-pulling the next generation of young scientists, each of whom would surely had gone on to do great things like finding the cure for cancer or implementing Star Trek's replicator (as opposed to the typical path(s) of eking out some marginal publications in graduate school to graduate before falling out of academia, or moving on to continue the publish-or-perish flailing with marginal publications as a postdoc, young faculty member, tenure-track faculty member, etc.). A better sob story than dismissing administrators en masse, where any news articles might cause even normies to ask "wait, why were there so many of these people working or ‘working’ there in the first place?" along the lines of the Claudine Gay resignation.
The status of American universities is like a dark comedy out in the open, where the parasite has taken over the host. Supposed institutes of higher learning, research, and teaching serve as daycares for young adults first (there's even bread—mealplans! and circuses—colleges sports!), make-work for administrators second, research a distant third, and teaching a fourth from there.
If someone would just yank student loans, they'd be restricted to their core purpose. Unfortunately, nobody can.
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Penn PhDs make about 30k a year, or 24k after taxes. Entry level at costco, maybe 1.5-2x minimum wage. Entry-level for someone with a bachelor's of science in a biotech company in Boston or SF is like 55-70k. 'Generous' is not a word I would use considering that they aren't sitting in class all day, they're spending 8-12 hours a day grinding out experiments so Penn professors (and grad students, to be fair) can publish papers. It's closer to an apprenticeship than what you typically think of as a college degree.
May be true at Penn, but isn't true at all of the state schools and smaller liberal arts college where the majority of people go. There's also complications around turf wars - the faculty of medicine can't just dip into the endowment when they feel like it. It's also easier to just turn on the taps in a few years if the administration changes than try to keep a constant enrollment.
Contrary to popular belief, international students at the PhD level are either self-funded or intensely meritocratic. Most of the NIH training grants and PhD student grants that fund a lot of students are unavailable to international students, so most schools cap it at 0-1 international students per year as their costs are harder to cover. Excepting cases like students from Singapore (and China in the past) coming over with a full ride from their government.
If you think private funding is going to increase innovation and development in STEM research, I've got a cancer drug that's going to increase your median lifespan by four months to sell you for 10,000$ a month. This drug was viewed as such a success (see figure 2) that it kicked off an enormous gold rush for radiopharm sweeping the entire biotech industry. None of those drugs are likely to be anything more than incremental improvements.
Philanthropic funding is different, but also harder to solicit. People with funding from HHMI, CZI, Gates foundation, Broad institute, etc. all do great work. Biotech research is just inherently too risky and capital-intensive to be worth it to VCs unless you're coming to them with something that's been pretty well worked out in academic labs already or the modality is already established to work on the market and you're just churning out a new drug for a different target.
There's plenty of reform in the life sciences that could be worthwhile. I agree that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to let Harvard skim a bunch of money for overhead costs, but as I mentioned, many of the scientists out there are working at places with much smaller/no endowments who need the overhead. Or if they had said we're capping overhead costs at X% and compensating by increasing the size of the grants by the same amount, then great. There's a real possibility that Tsinghua and Peking university are the global STEM centers for the next generation. Ten years ago Chinese universities were paper mills shilling unoriginal research in garbage journals, today I'd guess about 1/3rd-1/2 of Cell/Nature/Science papers are from entirely Chinese labs situated on the mainland. A popular new business model in the USA is just licensing drugs that were developed in China; it's hard to see this as anything other than outsourcing domestic talent and expertise the same way we did in so many other industries.
Cutting NIH funding isn't going to bring back manufacturing or balance the budget. It's just going to cripple the next generation of scientists and hand China a win.
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I'm having trouble understanding what this means. Are you saying that colleges cut down on law students during the financial crisis? This wouldn't seem to make sense because law schools are the biggest moneymakers for universities. Maybe fewer law students matriculated because they couldn't afford the tuition?
On a larger level, what can be done to prevent "malicious compliance", otherwise known as Washington Monument Syndrome or "firefighters first"? If anti-Trump organizations see a funding cut, they often immediately axe the programs that people want the most. They never seem to cut administration overhead, conference travel, DEI, or other frivolities. There was a story yesterday about Yosemite National Park firing the only person who had keys to the bathrooms, which they apparently had to do because of the Trump cuts.
I'm not sure that's what's going on here, but I think it's possible.
Big law firms basically froze hiring for a few years, smaller firms weren't doing great, jobs were hard to come by, those you could get didn't pay any better than other jobs, and huge percentage of law school graduates more or less gave up. So right now there's a huge demographic gap where you have partners in their 50s and associates in their 20s and early 30s and few people in between to do all the senior associate stuff. It's not exactly catastrophic, but it's not a position the firms want to be in again if they can help it.
Ah, that makes more sense. I've heard similar complaints from friends at Boeing about a lack of employees between 30 and 60 years old.
A similar thing happened with Millennials and the skilled trades/manufacturing. The '08 recession wrecked those sectors and in the absence of opportunity people went elsewhere, i.e. to college. As a then-student in the early 2010s who was handy with cars I worked with a guy (mechanical engineering major who was a significantly better mechanic than I) who'd quit his entry-level automotive job because slinging pizzas for Papa John's paid quite a bit better than being an apprentice mechanic, in addition to being a much easier job.
One of my uncles is a tradesman (a painter) and spent the early 2010s so broke that his wife and children occasionally lacked electricity. It was such that I emptied my wallet (We're talking like 50 bucks here.), and left it in the bed they'd let me sleep in during a visit (He'd have never taken a dime if I offered it to them, not even as a Christmas gift.). My uncle called me a few days later mentioning the money and I told him "Merry Christmas". It was the least I could do, and I wish I'd been in a position to do more.
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How do you distinguish malicious compliance from regular compliance? The orders themselves are malicious. They are designed to destroy the bureaucracy. This has both good effects and bad effects. Cremieux on Twitter passionately believes that the National Science Foundation firing its contract worker "experts" is compliance of such maliciousness that it warrents jail time. I looked into the details of the DOGE executive orders and the statutory authorization for NSF "experts", and I think this is a pretty straightforward execution of section 3(c) of Executive Order 14210.
I can't find anywhere in the NSF statute that mandates the use of contract "experts". 42 U.S.C. § 1873(a) authorizes the hiring of contract "experts", but does not mandate them. I also highly doubt that these "experts" are designated as "essential" during a lapse in appropriations. Additionally, contract "experts" do not get civil service protections, so they can be fired without going through the extensive prescribed RIF process. This isn't malicious compliance. This is a dispassionate execution of the President's order. You always fire the people who are easiest to fire first. Trump could have put in an exception for science like he did for immigration and law enforcement, but he didn't.
"If only the Tsar knew."
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This isn't in any way specific to "anti-Trump organizations" but how almost all such bureaucracies work. A while ago the Finnish Heritage Agency had to face some fairly minor (non-political) cost cuts. They promptly announced that this would "force" them to shut down some of the most popular museums and outdoor sites in an effort to artificially make those cuts seem worse and make them less popular instead of cutting some non-essential niche operations that the public cares little about.
Iron law of institutions remains undefeated
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DOGE seems to be doing better at that than anything I've seen before: Cut 100% of it, then reinstate funding for the good parts (this half is forthcoming from elsewhere?? Hopefully?).
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