Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid research cuts (opens in new tab)

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)

Here is a book about it:

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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?

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.

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 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.

First some basic math: if a project is budgeted at a direct cost of $500,000, the indirect rate of 60% applies to the $500,000, i.e. $300,000.

The total grant is thus $500K + $300K = $800K. The $300K indirect costs are thus 37.5% of the total. This is an upper limit, as many direct costs such as equipment do not get indirect rates applied to them.

Second, these rates are painstakingly negotiated with the NSF and NIH. Yearly audits to ensure compliance must be passed if funding is to continue.

Third, these indirect cost go towards to items such as electricity, heat, building maintenance, safety training and compliance, chemical disposal, and last by not least laboratory support services such as histology labs, proteomics core, compute infrastructure, and some full time staff scientific staff. Only a relatively small portion goes to administration.

Finally, scientists generally would welcome review and reform of indirect costs to ensure they get the maximize benefit from the indirect rates. However, DOGE is not interested in reform. They are interested in raze and burn destruction.

If DOGE gets its way, it will knock the Unites States off its perch as the world’s technological leader.

2024 appropriations (and it showed in many years before then-- Public Law 118-47. Statutes at Large 138 (2024): 677.

SEC. 224. In making Federal financial assistance, the provisions relating to indirect costs in part 75 of title 45, Code of Federal Regulations, including with respect to the approval of deviations from negotiated rates, shall continue to apply to the National Institutes of Health to the same extent and in the same manner as such provisions were applied in the third quarter of fiscal year 2017. None of the funds appropriated in this or prior Acts or otherwise made available to the Department of Health and Human Services or to any department or agency may be used to develop or implement a modified approach to such provisions, or to intentionally or substantially expand the fiscal effect of the approval of such deviations from negotiated rates beyond the proportional effect of such approvals in such quarter.

At the *very* least you should be following the administrative rules act (requiring you to solicit 45 days for comments by effected parties) before making such a dramatic change in policy.

Courts absolutely love striking down EOs (of both Dems and Reps Admins) when they should have been following the administrative rules act.

But the real question is why does the general public think 59% is too high? Irs an arbitrary number. Maybe an appropriate level of “overhead” is 1000%.

In reality the people who actually know anything about how this is calculated, across the board and across the political spectrum, do not think this is a major concern at all.

The only people who are complaining about it are the ones who hear the word overhead, have no concept of what it means other than taking a lay persons understanding that all overhead is unnecessary and are coming with the idea that anything above 0% is bad.

2. What is illegal about the change. The NIH overhead rate is actually negotiated directly between the institution and the NIH, following a process put into law. This is why a federal judge has blocked this order [1]. I'm far from a lawyer, but my read of this is that this is a change that would need to come through congress or a re-negotiation of the rates through the mandated process.

[1]: https://www.aamc.org/news/press-releases/aamc-lawsuit-result...

Besides the president screwing with the budget agreed upon by Congress that kicked all this off?

Instead, the grant is for $1.59M, and each individual charge to the grant pays an extra 59% to the university, conditionally, depending on the type of charge and the unbelievably messed up rules set by the university in concert with the government. Buying a $4000 laptop? Probably costs your grant balance $6360. Buying a $5000 laptop? Probably costs $5000 becuase it’s “capital equipment” or “major equipment” and is thus exempt. Guess who deliberately wastes their own and this also the university’s and government’s money by deliberately buying unnecessarily expensive stuff? It gets extra fun when the same research group has grants from different sources with different overhead rates: costs are allocated based on whether they are exempt from overhead!

And cost-plus disease is in full effect, too. If the research group doesn’t use all their awarded money because the finish the project early or below estimated cost, the university doesn’t get paid their share of the unspent money. This likely contributes to grantees never wanting to leave money unspent.

Of course, DOGE isn’t trying to fix any of the above.

For example:

- Complete elimination of federal workforce (RAGE)

- Full military withdrawal from NATO/Europe

- Dramatic cuts to essential services (eg, Social Security)

What potential actions would make you feel the downsides outweigh any benefits? I'm curious what your threshold is for acceptable vs. unacceptable changes.

If you focus on training PhDs, which is the American way, you get a steady stream of new people with fresh ideas. But then most PhDs must leave the academia after graduating.

If you focus on postdocs, you get more value from the PhDs you have trained. Most will still have to leave the academia, but it happens in a later career stage.

If you focus on long-term jobs, you have more experienced researchers working on longer-term projects. But then you are stuck with the people you chose before you had a good idea of their ability to contribute.

You can make a strong argument these institutions require reform, but such reform should be done not overnight, and not through such broad strokes.

No, when a major for-profit company outsources research they pay way more than a 50% “markup”. Unless they go to a research university: then they pay much less, and just like the federal government they are getting a fine deal.

Yes, some rich foundations (Gates, Ellison etc) exploit the situation and do not pay full overhead costs: They are essentially mooching on the research institutions and the federal government.

Move fast and break things is fine in a competitive marketplace. It’s asinine for the government to do.

The answer is to elect better politicians who can nominate better heads and those department heads can drive the necessary change without succumbing to the old guard.

The end of that period of reduction was Clinton's Presidency. Clinton's National Performance Review (NPR) started at the beginning his term in '93. It had goals very similar to the stated goals of this efficiency effort, but it was organized completely differently. He said, "I'll ask every member of our Cabinet to assign their best people to this project, managers, auditors, and frontline workers as well."

GPT4o: The NPR's initial report, released in September 1993, contained 384 recommendations focused on cutting red tape, empowering employees, and enhancing customer service. Implementation of these recommendations involved presidential directives, congressional actions, and agency-specific initiatives. Notably, the NPR led to the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, which required federal agencies to develop strategic plans and measure performance outcomes. Additionally, the NPR contributed to a reduction of over 377,000 federal jobs during the 1990s, primarily through buyouts, early retirements, natural attrition and some layoffs (reductions-in-force or RIFs).

Source: https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/papers/bkgrd/bri...):

The recommendations that involved changes to law, the GPRA, were passed in both houses of Congress by unanimous voice vote.

I don't think the stated goals of the current efficiency drive are controversial. The problem is the method. I want to understand the basis for people supporting those methods, the "we've got to break some eggs" crowd, when the example of the NPR exists. In my opinion, it didn't cause conflicts between branches of government, didn't disrupt markets, and was wildly successful. It also caused much less disruption in people's lives, because the changes were implemented over several years with much more warning.

I, personally, don't think the real goals of this effort are the stated goals, but that's a different issue.

I get ads on X that are just videos of animals being slowly shot multiple times to death. There's also some for tools to slim jim car locks. None of the mainstream/normal accounts I used to follow (shout out SwiftOnSecurity) are there, and instead it's a hotbed of crypto scams and deranged vitriol. The site is still running, but is a shell of its former self, making so little money that Elon is trying to sue people (and now, abusing US govt payment systems) to force them to pay him for advertising.

I can see how if you think that's a success, that you would think similar actions with regard to the US government are successful. The necessary cuts he's making are not necessary, and I'm guessing you aren't impacted, so, given the general lack of theory of mind towards others, I'm not surprised you think they're ok. The rest of us out there who understand the idea of human suffering are concerned for our fellow citizens facing arbitrary and unnecessary pain as the result of a capricious court eunach's drug influenced decisions before the "restabilization" that will never happen.

Moreover, scientific R&D is a strange place to slash if cost savings are the goal. Medicare and Medicaid comprise over 50 times the NIH and NSF combined budget of approximately $50B. If we want to save costs, research into diseases like Alzheimer’s Disease is the way to go. Alzheimer’s currently costs the nation $412B per year [1], eight times the NIH annual budget. Therapies which delayed the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease by 20 years would nearly eliminate this cost.

Let’s be clear: DOGE is led by a self described autist who has little idea how government and broader society functions. The damage he will do if left unchecked is vast.

[1] https://nchstats.com/alzheimers-disease-in-the-us/

And to the extent Twitter is still limping along it’s because Twitter due to its very nature benefits immensely from the stickiness of social networks.

For example, Facebook is almost completely junk. It hasn’t improved or been relevant in a long time. And yet it survives and makes tons of money simply because people don’t want to rebuild their networks.

There are many other examples where even minor cuts have been devastating. The classic example is of course GE, the ultimate example of cutting a company to the bone, which worked for a decade or so, but set the company up to essentially cease to exist after.

Then you have Boeing, a company in an industry with less competition than probably any other in the world and it’s struggling to make money because of this thinking.

Twitter hardly ever made money before and after is in the same state now. Its contribution (anything?) to this country is far different than a government institution.

The comparison here isn’t encouraging and makes no sense.

Great euphemism for “In one month, we’re going to kill tens of millions by withholding food/medical care and permanently destroy institutions that took a century to build”.

I’m going to use that phrase.

Meanwhile, the companies Musk built that actually have dominated their space are big idea innovators like Tesla and SpaceX. Musk wasn’t successful because he’s a good penny pincher, he was successful by burning cash on big ideas and talented people.

But somehow we decided its case 1 that we’ll apply to the government.

Sure, if we detonate all nukes, I imagine 20% of humanity will survive. "We" won't die out that easily. Me and you are probably dead, though. Statistically speaking.

[0]: <https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...>

US Government is not Twitter, but yeah, I can see some element of it. Now I suddenly remember, the various comments here convinced me that X/Twitter will be dead in just two months. Yet, it's still around. Not that I care to make account there or bother looking at it, but I figure if it kept crashing, it would show up in the news. Maybe everyone moved to bluesky and it just doesn't have any customers?

social security and medicaid, absolutely not (scrutiny, fine; cuts, no)

Even in the defense industry, a cost-plus contract with a 10% margin is a lot. And it’s a federal crime to include costs in the overhead amount that aren’t traceable to the actual project.

University 1 gets $100. $10 of it goes to admin, $90 to researcher. Researcher spends $60 on supplies and equipment. This is accounted for as 10% administrative overhead.

University 2 gets $100. $20 of it goes to admin, $40 to researcher, $40 to supplies and equipment. This is accounted for as 60% administrative overhead.

Is this an accurate characterization of your claim?

if a grant is the same $1M and Bozo University gets to spend all million on the actual research at hand, but UCSF only gets 200K, how is UCSF more efficient?

Wouldn't the LN2 be traceable to the project either way as direct non-overhead cost, but UCSF efficiency makes that cost lower, achieving the same overhead ratio but either a lower grant cost or more researcher stipend?

Take the army for example, it's estimated 30~40% of the workforce is dedicated to logistics. This is equivalent to 42~66% overhead (in the same sense that overhead is discussed in the context of academia, as +% cost) if you were to count only combat personnel as the direct costs.

This is was universities do, they only count research expenses as the direct costs. Yet it's quite obvious a university can't run just on scientists.

This 59% overhead is equivalent to 37% of the expenses. So, unlike you, I'm positively surprised that 63% of expenses go directly to the core mission with only 37% "waste" (which is necessary to ensure the scientists can actually work, and work efficiently).