Now, if you have figures showing that what you claim is true on the whole across all of US higher education, please, by all means, post the links. I'm genuinely interested to know just how different it is with the larger universities.
We know this information because the colleges give it out. They are transparent.
There's not much the colleges can do if somebody is commenting without researching.
If differential pricing based on ability to pay is a reason to destroy something, then we had better destroy 90% of B2B. But it's not a reason, you're just parroting the same desired end result no matter what is actually said about universities.
Destruction of scientific research is viewed as a positive win for the culture war. The particulars, what's actually happening with science, is completely secondary to discrediting the institution as a whole.
Have you considered holding it to the same standard you want to hold your enemies to?
Academia in particular loves to push one-track thought and cancel culture. Hard to believe it used to be a place for diverse thought and DIScourse. Now if you disagree with the groupthink you are a racist. It's a very 2001 George Bush "you are either with us or against us" culture that absolutely deserves to have its funding cut.
That's going away too with the ban on immigration. A large amount of high margin tuition is from overseas students.
It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students as they graduate and create a system to promote student visa to green card to naturalization, but only a very few do.
Mostly, foreign students are price gouged by our universities to prop up a failing business model and make it more difficult for citizens to afford higher education.
International student enrolment is down 17% this year, because the administration chose to take a broadly similar approach to student visas as they did to immigration, with a "pause" on interviews and lots of revocations, plus of course the concern their lawful student visa status isn't a guarantee they won't get taken off to processing centres by ICE thugs with quotas to hit. Other bright ideas the administration proposed with include a four year student visa limit to rule out the possibility of completing a PhD in a normal time frame. That's gonna hurt universities using the foreign students to prop their business up, and citizens who'll have to pick up their tab instead if they want their courses to continue...
> United States best interest
The US is a resource to be stripped, the interest in mind is self-interest. "Make us great again!" Back to the gilded age, whatever it takes.
> It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students
Yeah? Tell that to the US government.
As it stands, foreign student enrollment has dropped precipitously year-on-year. The international students are scared, and with good reason.
If ICE happens to roll up to campus, do you really think they'll be checking each student's visa status? Not on your life. They'll just round up everyone who doesn't look white enough, and if they're very, very lucky, they might just get sent back home in a speedy manner. If they're not, they'll get put in camps for indeterminate amounts of time, denied any access to the legal system, and treated worse than animals.
These rates are all highly negotiated and highly justified down to details. The average professor may not know how much overhead goes into actually running lab space and paying for all the infrastructure that's necessary for research, but it's not insubstantial.
People who know nothing about that side of the business, even professors at universities, say "that's outrageous, let's cut it" without even understanding where the money goes. It's a very DOGE view, and a disastrous one to act on without first understanding the particulars.
That's because organizations get bigger as projects become more complicated and varied. Larger organizations require more overhead as a percentage of the operating costs. 30 years ago many schools didn't even have Computer Science departments. Today schools are now starting to stand up Artificial Intelligence departments. It's not cheap to maintain these organizations.
Anyway, it really comes down to a simple tension: you can have big science, good science, or cheap science. Choose two.
For a long time we've optimized for big and good. This has yielded dividends in terms of science and technology output, but it's very expensive. Yet, the ROI is decidedly, emphatically positive.
For some reason people seem to think we can do this all cheaper, somehow, by pulling funding and making all these organizations smaller. I don't see how this is possible, because it relies on an uncanny ability to predict which projects will succeed and fail ahead of time.
What I think will happen is the money will dry up, the talent will go to places that want to spend the money, and the remaining programs will be cheap, small-stakes research better suited for the 20th century, unable to compete with countries that actually want to invest in the future.
Who's doing the research? Who's benefiting?
VC backed companies are often slotted in as the for profit version of academic R&D without the "encumbrances" of non-profitable blue-sky pure research.
Which is what some people want, but other people recognize that more research, bigger projects, and large, world-class academic organizations capable of conducting it are part of maintaining strong national security. Such activities are not cheap, they are also not profitable, but again because they are crucial for national security, it's the government's prerogative and obligation to help fund such activities, even if you consider it grift.
Something I learned a long time ago is that it doesn't matter how well you argue a point with a nincompoop, they will simply shrug and repeat their horseradish verbatim in the next thread, hoping that next time they don't attract an audience with as much critical thinking. Unless you are willing to waste as much time as they are arguing on the internet, it's a fruitless endeavor.
It's really up to the moderators of a social space to keep bad faith nincompoops out, and Hacker News has shown themselves to be complicit and unwilling to do what is necessary to prevent its own enshittification. At this point, this place is just Reddit with a tone policing and a nuclear downvote button.
The tech community was the source of the largest threat to American science in a century. As cheesy as it sounds, I think its my duty to counter the lazy talking points that otherwise go unaddressed in these circles.
That does help, and is part of the reason I myself engage with these folks from time to time, but it requires discipline to recognize when you're throwing good effort after bad.
You want to give your voice the greatest chance of being seen. Strategically responding to upvoted bad faith in a highly visible thread is a good idea. Keeping an argument alive 5-6 levels deep in a subthread that was already flagged is less so.
Hacker News is Reddit with a tech-supremacy mindset.
I've seen too many promising academic careers torched at 6-years because they had unfundable ideas. With this new administration, we see how "fundability" and "good important research" are often at odds and can change as quickly as the political winds.
When I was in gradschool it was over drones and the politics was within the FAA and their shifting definitions of what an "unmanned aerial vehicle" technically was. Recently you wouldn't get funding if you didn't have the word "equity" in your proposal. Now you don't get funding if you do have the word "equity" in your proposal. New boss, same as old boss.
Heaven forbid you were researching suddenly now <VORBOTEN> topic, your entire career is torched. I just didn't want to tie my career to that kind of capriciousness.
Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.
During the doubling of the NIH budget under Clinton and Bush the younger times were great. After, budgets stagnated and things were harder but there was still funding out there. The disruption we're seeing now is a completely different animal: program officers are gone, fewer and less detailed summary statements go out, some programs are on hiatus (SBIR/STTR) and if you have something in the till it was wasted time, &c. NSF is a complete train wreck.
My startup had an STTR in for the last cycle and we can't talk to the program officer about our summary statement, nor can we resubmit, nor are we likely to be funded. That's a lot of lost time and money for a startup that, since we're atoms and not bits, is funded on a shoestring budget. The only time something like this happened in my memory was the shutdown in 2013 and that wasn't even close to the disruption we're seeing now.
But again, I explicitly said that my point was independent of recent changes in funding. I am no longer in science, but it seems to be true that funding has declined. That doesn’t mean that chasing grants is something unprecedented for scientists to be doing.
One last time: OP was complaining that the group has to spend all of it's time raising funding, but that's always been true in my lifetime. There's never been a magical age where being a PI (or even a senior lab member) wasn't a perpetual process of raising funds, and anyone going into science should know this. Hence my comment: welcome to academia.
For whatever it's worth, this is basically reason #1 that most PhD grads I know voluntarily jumped off the hamster wheel. Anyone who gets a PhD and expects to be doing labwork as a PI is deeply deluded, and it needs to be shouted for the folks in the back: you are signing up for a lifetime of writing grants, teaching classes, and otherwise doing bureaucratic schleps. The current administration did not suddenly make this true.
You're saying that a group having to spend all of its time fundraising has always been true in your lifetime and you link it to your time as a grad student decades ago and earlier when you were an undergrad. Do I have that right? The dominance of fundraising might have been true for your specific experience and viewpoint, but I don't understand your basis for claiming it was universal: it certainly wasn't my experience (R1 engineering, not software) nor my colleagues around that time.
Complaints about fundraising and administrivia have always been plentiful but actual time spent on teaching and service and research were dominant, with the expected proportions of the three legged stool varying based on role and institution. What SubiculumCode and bane and myself are reacting to now is the dramatic shift in how dominant (because funding has been pulled, funding allocation methods have suddenly shifted) and unproductive (fewer summary statements, less or no feedback from SROs and POs, eliminated opportunities for resubmissions) that work has become. The closest I can remember to the current was around the aftermath of the 2008 recession and 2013 government shutdown and that pales in comparison to the disruption of now.
edit: best study I could casually find is Anderson and Slade (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11162-015-9376-9) from 2016 that estimates grant writing at about 10% effort.
I mean, yes...but everyone on this thread admits that it's still true (in fact, worse today), so I'm not sure what point you're making with this. Y'all are arguing that it's worse now, which is not a claim I am disputing [1]. The entire point of citing my "old" experience is that, in fact, we were all doing the same stuff back in the stone ages. I also haven't forgotten or misremembered due to my advancing age [2].
> The dominance of fundraising might have been true for your specific experience and viewpoint, but I don't understand your basis for claiming it was universal: it certainly wasn't my experience (R1 engineering, not software) nor my colleagues around that time.
OK. I never said my experience was universal. I was in the biological sciences, not engineering. To be clear, I'm not claiming experience in economics or english literature, either.
Again, I don't dispute that things might be worse today, but the situation is absolutely not new, and any grad student in the sciences [3] who expects otherwise has been seriously misled. That is my point.
[1] To be clear, I'm not saying it is or isn't worse today. I am making no claim with regard to the severity of the fundraising market. The market can be a bajillion times worse than when I came up, and my point is still valid -- back then, professors spent nearly all of their time chasing money! Today, professors spend nearly all of their time chasing money!
[2] This is a joke. I'm not old, and my experiences not as ancient as you're alluding. I understand that every generation clings to the belief that their struggles are unique in time, but it's probably a bad idea to take that notion seriously.
[3] Yes, I made the general claim "in the sciences". Because insults about age aside, and even though the specifics will vary from year to year and topic to topic, it's very important to realize that if you become a professor in the sciences, this is what you will be doing. You will not be in the lab making gadgets or potions or whatever -- you will be filling out grants, making slide decks, reviewing papers, and giving talks. If you cannot handle this life, quit now. It will not get better.
There are certainly ways to go work in a lab and do "fun stuff" forever, but a) you often don't need a graduate degree for these, and b) you shouldn't be deluded about which path you're on.
I’m not joking. I’m not exaggerating. This is the job, and it’s always been this way (at least in my lifetime). Maybe it’s worse because of the current administration, but complaining that academic life is mostly about grant writing is like a fish complaining about water.
Yes, previous US presidents told some lies.
Yes, previous US presidents and politicians had some unsavory associations or potential conflicts of interest.
Yes, previously some labs spent too much time writing grants and not enough actually doing research.
The problem is, these things are becoming the norm now, and your anecdotal memory of "aw, man, we spent all our time doing that back in the day!" is not a reliable indicator that really, nothing has changed, we should just stop complaining. Especially since we know that human memory is not only fallible, it is prone to specifically being better at remembering the exceptional, and the unpleasant.
If a private lab needs a chemist or biologist for say, quality assurance, one of the most common jobs in the field, then privates prefer fresh graduates:
- they cost much less
- even if the PhD would be fine with the pay, he/she will still be skipped over a fresh graduate because the person is over qualified and will jump to something more related to his/her field as soon as possible.
Thus these people's CV are genuinely worse for anything unrelated to their skill set.
Natural sciences such as biology or chemistry are different from physics or maths or engineering fields.
More fundamentally this mentality of looking at education only through the lens of financial return is just so disappointing. Of course your country is self-sabotaging its science system if it's full of people who think that way.
I can pretty safely say that me and most people around me, when we got our PhDs, what job we'd later get really wasn't the primary concern.
We wanted to work on interesting problems at the frontier of what's known (and maybe also get a job doing that later).
If you spend 10 years of your life working on dye sensitized solar cells and perovskite, the number of positions for those roles in your area/country might be limited or non existent and at the same time you may no longer find any funding at your current position.
Thus you need to look for jobs outside your sphere of conpetence and for those your PhD may not be that useful, if not even a malus.
I have a friend who has a PhD in applied mathematics, has spent the last 5 years of his life on deep and machine learning problems, and he's applied to several positions as an ML researcher and his CV is not considered often due to the lack of professional, non academic experience.
And we talking the very booming ML sector for someone who understands the ins and outs of the math and architecture behind the models (area: UK and northern Europe).
Depends on the market, which is true for any field. In places where there's a lot of technical work to be done, employers can hire PhD's and will do so if there's a local supply.
> It might take decades to recover our research programs.
It's very optimistic to think that this madness is going to end in four years.
The idiocracy is a global trend
What's worse is that in most of these fields, you don't really even start working until after your PhD.
4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.