An average NIH R01 grant is $600,000 dollars per year for ~5 years. Forgoing a $100m student center would net you 33 projects. For reference, Stanford had 1000 ongoing projects for FY 2025
Most of that "grift" goes to salaries for professors, staff, for the very expensive lab space, pensions and health care for the professors, etc.
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.
I don't know how to comment on this considering you don't seem to know that the majority of research staff salaries in highly successful labs is paid entirely through grant money.
"administrative grift" as you call it is on top of awarded amounts, not a part of it. If the University is forced to spend all $3M themselves and also forego the operating overhead, what you'll get isn't more projects but fewer projects and also smaller, less capable research organizations.
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.
The increase in F&A rates is due to the facilities portion, which in the "before times" was negotiated every 4 years with DHHS and had concrete data in the negotiation process to help ensure it was fair. The admin portion for universities has been capped at 26% since 1991.
I see comments like this where destructionists have their simplistic bullshit releasing on full-spread, and it reminds me to go back and upvote the article. HN is one of the few places where this feel-good nonsense actually gets rejected, giving us the possibility of discussing how to move past this societal mental illness.
> HN is one of the few places where this feel-good nonsense actually gets rejected
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 way I think about it is that the person I'm arguing with online is not really the person I'm trying to persuade; I'm trying to persuade the rest of the people reading.
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.
> I'm trying to persuade the rest of the people reading.
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.
The mods here are worse than complicit. Dang in the past has allowed threats of violence while warning/deleting/banning petty name calling in the responses. It’s frankly disgusting.
Hacker News is Reddit with a tech-supremacy mindset.
More nonsense - indirect costs fund shared facilities, equipment, supplies, and data resources. To the extent that there is bloat, it funds the compliance that they are required by law to do. I would support simplifying this to reduce regulatory cost; I do not support paranoid whining.
The ratio has just been going up and up and up, and to suggest it pays for "equipment, supplies and data resources" is a bad joke considering the people doing the work end up saddled with yet more administrative bloat in the form of hostile, complicated processes in accessing the funds to buy the very equipment and supplies that enables the research.
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.
I don't believe that the feeling is that it can be done "cheap", but rather the inevitable draw towards privatizing previously government functions. This drives towards a more immediate profit motive, which inevitably pushes research towards a more applied focus.
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 tuition are you referring to? Nameplate tuition is like the sticker price on a new car; few to no people pay it. Net tuition is the number that actually matters, and it's been largely flat the last 8 years.
I don't know the figures for large universities, but at the small liberal arts college I graduated from and the one I've worked at for the last 15 years, the average figure for "full pay" students—which, as the name suggests, is the students who pay, or whose families pay, the full sticker price, either directly or through loans—has generally been between 46% and 53%.
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.
So you're saying academics use the same opaque market practices as, e.g. health insurance? Yeah all the more reasons to cut funding. If they have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear with transparency.
You seem to have no interest in transparance or understanding, but answer everything with "cut the universities" no matter what.
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.
Overseas students are not immigrants. They are on student visas (and most likely from very wealthy families... at least most of the ones I knew at Purdue were).
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.
Sure, it's in the United States' interest to retain the best foreign students (and in many students' interest to study in a country which will permit them to live and work there after their study). That doesn't mean the current administration is necessarily inclined to act this way
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...
One reason foreign enrollment is declining is concern about (mainly) Chinese espionage. That’s entirely reasonable, given the vast amount of stolen engineering and research…
That is the mind hack. People will always assume that the administration has the United States best interest in mind. If people can drop that assumption, they might make a beginning with understanding the firehose of seemingly erratic policy.
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.
They need to cut funding until academia stops gamifying the research process. Aka cheating. It's bizarre to hear the stories that come out of this twisted world and then seeing them expect to keep getting paid the same.
Whenever I have dug into views like these, this is not a rational view based on first principles, it's about carrying out culture war based on a very odd phrase I heard first here on Hacker News: "elite conflict."
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.
It's bizarre to hear the words that come out of this administration's mouth on... Almost any topic, and then see an actual person actually arguing that anything those people say or do needs to be defended.
Have you considered holding it to the same standard you want to hold your enemies to?
Not everyone is a tribalist.i don't have to agree with everything Trump does. Do you not know that? Or does the world feel safer when you split people into simple categories?
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.
