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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4) Profit!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps you forget or ignored to read the complete sentence.

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

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

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

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

> not sustainable with so much wastage on unnecessary overheads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's an analogy:

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

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

Here is a book about it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So everyone should always be included in conversations if desired, but coming in with an uninformed opinion spoken loudly, desiring more to be “right” than to come to an understanding, won’t typically be appreciated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You could argue the university should just fire a bunch of administrators and fund grad students with the money, but it’s not going to cover the hole, it would be catastrophic for day-to-day operations, and it’s just plain reckless to tear apart your entire org chart in response to DOGE’s ignorance and impulsiveness.

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

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

false

> university admins, whose salaries come from tuition, donations, and endowments

and the "indirect costs" portion of federal grants

> ignorance of some HN commentators

oh there's plenty of that alright

The shallowest of dismissals… not interesting/disappointing to encounter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Increases in student services (ie sports)

2. Laws and regulations, like Title IX

3. Increased bureaucracy around government grants and research funding

4. Huge endowments that need managers

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

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

For example, do you really think Dartmouth is failing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a vicious feedback loop.

thanks for correcting me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every industry has. Education more than most.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because things never made headlines and you never paid attention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- talk about academic "administrators"

- lazily generalize

- be intellectually honest

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

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

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

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

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

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

For instance, one university has:

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

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

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

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

- admin staff 28%

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

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