Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid research cuts
151 comments
·February 23, 2025blindriver
jasonhong
It's possible that there may be too many administrators at a university, but from my perspective after 20+ years in academia, 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.
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.
SubiculumCode
As a fellow academic at a major research institution, I agree that the regulatory aspect (IRB, grant money auditing, etc) is a huge financial burden requiring many staff. This is not something that universities can easily reduce without loosening requirements at the Federal level
teleforce
> one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits
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.
danny_codes
I wouldn’t trust an LLM to do anything compliance related. Sounds like a recipe for a lawsuit
aithrowawaycomm
There is nothing telling here beyond the resentment and ignorance of some HN commentators. Most graduate students don’t pay tuition because they are funded via the federal government in some form or another - this also includes stipends for TAs and RA. It’s a completely different source of money from university admins, whose salaries come from tuition, donations, and endowments.
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.
mlrtime
So why not just use the endowment, why does the tax payer need to fund this? 22.3 Billion isn't enough?
tzs
They are using their endowment. They spend around 4-5% of it each year.
gotoeleven
The EO in question literally just reduces the amount that can be spent on overhead. Maybe they should try reducing overhead?
adgjlsfhk1
because most of that overhead isn't removable. all of your chemistry/biology/physics research has labs and lab managers as overhead. that is intrinsically expensive.
hooverd
"Overhead" here is things like physical plant and shared resources.
wendyshu
> it would be catastrophic for day-to-day operations
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
timcobb
> false
The shallowest of dismissals… not interesting/disappointing to encounter
csomar
Then how did the universities operate before the increases? How come digitalization is not able to reduce the admin numbers. You are the one to justify why you need this additional overhead and not the other way around.
PhotonHunter
They didn’t used to have to deal with FAR and DFARS compliance, export compliance, cybersecurity, iEdison reporting, and so on. Nevertheless, the administrative component of F&A indirects has been capped at 26% for years. The universities have to fill the budget gap with other funds (and no, not tuition, that is not used for the research enterprise).
HelloMcFly
In addition to what the other commenter said, most of the public universities doing scientific research used to be far better funded from their states than they are today on a cost-per-student basis. Additional administrative staff that many universities now have is often necessitated by their regulatory complexity as well as the need for generating different sources of funding. These are broad statements that do oversimplify matters, but part of the full story.
apical_dendrite
Why would digitization reduce the number of university admins? I'm sure there were some clerks and secretaries whose jobs were automated, but the universities also had to add huge IT departments. Plus, everything about a university is more complicated now then in was 50 years ago. In 1970, Harvard had 6000 applicants for 1200 freshman spots. Today it has 54,000 for 1900 spots. I'm sure the percentage that are international is vastly higher now. Probably a higher percentage want to visit campus. Financial aid is a lot more complicated. So just the admissions office is doing much more work.
scarby2
> Then how did the universities operate before the increases?
Easily. Every additional rule and regulation has a compliance cost, we've added far too many rules and regulations.
bko
In Dan Simmons' novel "Hyperion," one of the characters describes a government agency that both builds monuments and provides medical care to children. When faced with budget cuts, they reduce the medical care while continuing to build monuments, because monuments are visible evidence of their work while the absence of medical care only shows up in statistics.
The administrators are the school at this point, why would they choose to cut there?
jltsiren
If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers. This is basically the same situation.
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.
acdha
> If there are regulations governing what the university is allowed to do with federal money, the university needs administrators to ensure and report compliance
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.
heylook
> If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers.
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.
pclmulqdq
I had one professor at college who remarked on how all of the parking garages on campus used to be parking lots 30 years ago, and are equally full today that they were back then. The student and faculty population hasn't changed over that time, but the growth of administration was explosive.
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
fraggleysun
May I suggest a fifth possibility: your core assumption is flawed and your professor hasn’t been paying attention.
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.
kelnos
Not every school wants to grow the size of their student body. And there shouldn't be any reason why they would be forced to.
pclmulqdq
This was at a college where indeed the student population did not change in size. The same goes for the professors, whose population grew about 5% over that time.
bilbo0s
Those 4 aren't really adding much overhead.
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.
rblatz
I worked at a large public university. The University had a large central IT team, but each college had its own independent IT team that managed their own computers, network, printers, and other technology. Each also had their own software dev teams and there was significant overlap an inefficiencies in this model.
tomohelix
Nobody would fire themselves or their close friends/colleagues. But they would also want less work and delegate responsibilities. So if left alone, admins would have all the incentive to hire more reports and try to cut cost elsewhere instead of themselves, which lead to reduced revenue and bloated institutions.
It is a vicious feedback loop.
uberman
Who do you think advises students getting into classes, who do you think reviews applications or works with companies to get students jobs. There is administrative over head because these activities are not core competencies of researchers.
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.
pclmulqdq
At many schools, advising is a professorial responsibility. Professors have a hard job, but they have a job that is very powerful and prestigious and can be incredibly lucrative (thanks to consulting gigs, patents, etc.).
null
heylook
...subsidized housing, normalized sabbaticals, teaching a course that uses the textbook you yourself wrote...
tptacek
Everything that isn't PIs and grad students is funded out of admin, including all the lab techs.
seanmcdirmid
That isn’t true. Research staff is funded via grants almost exclusively, in computer science. I’m not sure about the sciences, but I would assume they would have a lot of labs that are not set up for education and would be funded mostly by grants.
tptacek
Well, I'm the parent of a biochemistry lab tech currently selecting Phd project admits, but, I don't know, maybe my kid is making up that he's paid out of admin.
PhotonHunter
Lab techs are often classified as “administrative and professional” employees by university HR but on NIH grants they would be paid for as a direct cost, other personnel (B on the R&R budget form).
jleyank
Computer clusters, chem or bio lab gear, staff and techs, …. Some of this isn’t cheap and it’s not safe to let the grad students and p-docs do it. And somebody has to TA all those pre-xx and other mid to advanced course students.
bglazer
This ends with America’s domestic biotech and pharmaceutical industry functionally disappearing and being shipped offshore, similar to many previously American led industries. This is already happening [1], and will only accelerate as academic bio research is strangled. There are all kinds of cultural justifications being thrown around for this, all kinds of grievances being rehashed or invented in real time, but it’s the same old story as manufacturing in America. It’s just wealthy powerful people stripping an industry for parts, disinvesting and pocketing the remains.
https://www.biospace.com/business/big-pharma-rushes-to-china...
tptacek
Vanderbilt apparently iced its entire incoming biochemistry PhD headcount? My kid got a reject, and found out later that everybody else did too.
hyperbovine
I’ve heard from colleagues that numerous biostats programs also did this. Zero PhD admits for the 2025 cohorts. If the department has bio in the title there’s a good chance almost all of its operating budget comes/came from NIH.
osnium123
There are going to be a lot of repercussions in the future given how many potential future scientists won’t get trained.
HarryHirsch
Where's the pharma lobby? Pharma is the only industrial science left in the country!
icegreentea2
They're weighing the impact on their future workforce pipeline (and probably hoping this this only represents a ~4-8 year hiccup) against whatever other benefits they can get from cozying up with the administration (whacky regulation land).
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pharma-ceos-speaki...
And who knows, with the right wacky regulatory scheme enacted, the workforce impact will be mitigated away. Probably also banking on the size and power of the American domestic economy to still allow them to siphon talent from across the western world to help make up some short falls.
osnium123
Maybe they can start bringing in folks trained in the EU, Canada and China.
bglazer
They are currently on their way to Mar a Lago to ask Trump to roll back the drug price negotiation provisions that were instated by the Inflation Reduction Act
https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/phrma-prepares-meet-trum...
wendyshu
The US graduates too many PHDs, not too few
osnium123
It’s better to graduate too many than too few because it helps ensure that the US workforce of scientists and engineers is cost competitive.
heylook
Too many PhDs... in biochemistry...?
Unearned5161
do you care to elaborate? what is too many and what are the repercussions of this?
neilv
> A Penn professor, who requested anonymity due to fear of retribution, told the DP that the decision appeared to be “last minute” and came after departments had already informed the University of the students who were selected for graduate programs.
> The professor added that the University “pulled the rug out” from many faculty members, some of whom had already offered acceptances to students they had thought were admitted — only to now face the possibility of having to cut those students from the program.
If students were informed they were accepted, by anyone at the university (even verbally by a professor), then it's time for the university to cover this (regardless of which budgets it was supposed to come out of), even if it has to draw down the endowment.
Unless the university is willing to ruin a bunch of students' lives in brinksmanship, and then deal with the well-deserved lawsuits.
selimthegrim
I don’t think the relationship between departments and the central University is what you think it is
neilv
Will wronged parties who decide to sue, sue the department, or the university?
selimthegrim
They would sue the professors in their individual capacity as well as the university.
kitrose
According to Wikipedia, Penn has an endowment of over $22 billion.
Not enough in the piggy bank to cover?
tzs
The whole point of an endowment is to support whatever it was created to support in perpetuity. They do that by investing the endowment and using most of the income from those investments to support the endowment's mission, and a small part to grow the endowment over time.
Penn is spending around $1 billion/year from their endowment, which is a fairly reasonably amount for an endowment of $22 billion.
sethev
Penn's endowment distributed $1.1 billion last year. Endowments like this are managed to last a long time - indefinitely, even.
Penn itself is older than the United States - they're not going to start blowing through their endowment because of political trends over the last couple months (or next 4 years), even if they legally could.
osnium123
Endowments can be very restrictive and thus it’s hard to shuffle money around.
nielsbot
What are they for then?
jasonhong
As one simple example, some funds are for endowed chairs, named after donors or companies. For example, in computer science at Carnegie Mellon, we have chairs named for Richard King Mellon, Kavčić-Moura, Thomas and Lydia Moran, and more. (You can see a full list here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~scsfacts/endowed.html)
It costs a few million to create an endowed chair, and these funds can only be used to help offset salary costs for that professor (thus helping with the budget for the department) and for research associated with that professor. You can't just use all of the money in these endowed chairs for other things that people in this thread are suggesting, it's not fungible.
You know, folks on HN often re-post links to Chesterton's Fence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...), about trying to understand how things are done and why, before tearing things down and potentially causing more problems. I'd highly suggest the folks in this thread that are exhibiting a lot of anger about academia keep Chesterton's Fence in mind. Yes, academia has problems (as do all human institutions and organizations), but the amount of good academia offers is quite vast in terms of advances in science, arts, education, public discourse, startups, and more.
tomohelix
It is a trust fund basically. From what I uderstand, the principal is nearly impossible to use/withdraw and you can only use the interest/returns generated from investing the principle.
Even that portion is also restricted. The purpose must be strictly academic and some part must be paid to the university, some must be reinvested, and then the final pieces can be used at the professor's discretion according to the rules set when the endowment is established.
So generally, you are looking at 1-2% of the total amount that can be spent annually. Still a lot, but for research, tens of millions would still not be enough for something like Penn.
apical_dendrite
Typically, they're set up so that the income goes to a particular purpose, or so that only the income is used. For instance, a big chunk of Harvard's engineering and CS professorships are funded through a donation from a 19th century inventor of machines to make shoes. His intent was to fund professorships in "practical sciences" in perpetuity, and he had particular terms - he wanted salaries to be competitive for instance. The university can't legally spend down the principal or use the money for some other purpose.
chatmasta
Endowments are investment funds that ideally generate sufficient returns to cover yearly operational expenses while also growing the principal.
TrackerFF
Sometimes donations which are specifically earmarked for something.
saulrh
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy and tax deductions, as far as I can tell.
oldpersonintx
[dead]
binarycrusader
As the other poster mentioned, endowments / donations often come with conditions attached that significantly restricts how money from them can be used.
blackeyeblitzar
Great point. It’s bad enough seeing bloat in costs, administrators, and activist degrees. But it’s downright ridiculous that universities with billions can’t fund themselves using just investment income. If endowments are claimed to be restricted, I want to see the terms transparently, and see them using the funds maximally before coming back to taxpayers.
But also - why is no one asking whether we need so many college educated students. I don’t think it makes sense for every random person to get a degree or a graduate degree. These programs need to be highly selective since the supply is greater than demand, particularly for graduate degrees.
kelnos
Penn has a $22B endowment, and pulls around 5% out of that annually. That seems to be a reasonably safe number that will give them a good chance of at worst keeping the endowment's size constant. Sure, they can take out more every year (they'd have to take out more than 4x that to match Penn's current budget), but then their endowment would reduce in value every year and eventually run out. That would not be a good outcome.
apical_dendrite
Penn's budget is $4.7 billion (just the university, not including the hospitals). Even with a $22 billion endowment, they can only fund a fraction of that off of investment income.
And what are you even talking about "coming back to the taxpayers"? This isn't like a sports team holding a city hostage to get a new stadium. They apply for competitive grants to do particular research projects, then they do those projects. They aren't asking for a handout, they are being paid to provide a much-needed service (health research).
pclmulqdq
The administrators, athletic coaches, and non-productive tenured professors all cost a lot, and their hands were in the pie before these students' were. By the way, the students in question are for the "activist degrees" you mentioned - they seem to all be in the humanities.
nielsbot
What is an "activist degree"? (Is activism bad?)
cyberax
Usually impractical and heavily politicized stuff like "colonialism studies".
Activism is not necessarily bad, but the current university environment, for some reason, seems to produce activists who are just unbelievably cringe and naïve.
sega_sai
Now, imagine the alternative universe where the government was actually interested in reducing administrative bloat in universities. It could have introduced for example a limit on grant overhead on all future grants, which would have likely forced universities find saving in admin/sports etc. Obviously we don't live in that universe. We live in the world where capricious government with people like Musk who think they know everything better than everyone else just introduces arbitrary cuts. And then various commenters (including here) contort themselves trying to justify those cuts.
Domenic_S
> It could have introduced for example a limit on grant overhead on all future grants
So exactly what they introduced, except not applying to current grants?
> forced universities find saving in admin/sports etc.
Aren't sports a net money generator for universities?
cozzyd
If only Penn had the richest and most powerful men in the world as alumni
Onavo
Yeah, move over Harvard and Yale. Two of Penn's alumni are currently running the country.
mizzao
As a Wharton grad, the place basically trains people to be ruthless and make money. Morality, history, and liberal arts are not part of the curriculum. It appears to have succeeded...?
HarryHirsch
Back then it used to be the running joke about economists: "if everyone takes care of himself, everyone is taken care of"
ayakang31415
In the article, they did not specify if the funding cut is a result of re-structuring direct-indirect cost ratio (essentially no research cut but the administration cut only), or the fund granted to a fewer researchers. If they actually receive less money for the same current researches, there is no need to accept fewer students.
pmags
Many of the comments here reveal a profound ignorance about the actual costs of conducting biomedical research, as well as a lack of knowledge what the Trump administration is doing to knee-cap NIH funding.
1. If you want to have some perspective on what indirect costs actually cover I'd recommend this video (published 2 years ago) by AAU, AAMC, and other partner associations. -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxTDlFvkvio
2. The courts have temporarily blocked the indirect cuts to existing grants, but the Trump administration is using other backdoor means to further withhold funding. See this article in Nature -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxTDlFvkvio
The long and the short of it, is that NIH is not reviewing grants or making awards at anywhere near "normal". Study sections are being cancelled at the last minute without any certainty about when they will be held. Investigators with existing multi-year grants don't know what to expect at renewal time. Factor in the layoffs at NIH and NSF as well.
The administration has also said they intend to cut NSF budgets from $9B to about $3B dollars.
Under these circumstances it would be irresponsible for universities to admit normal numbers of graduate students.
Even if tomorrow the Trump administration said "Whoops, we messed up" and reversed all executive orders, I'd estimate they've cost the US research enterprise something like 12-18 months of productivity. And we're only 1 month into Trump 2.0.
Here's some other knock on effects I anticipate we'll see in the next 3-6 months:
1. Opportunities for undergrad research will be greatly reduced. If you have a college age kid who's interested in engaging in research of any kind (sciences, humanities, engineering) they will have many fewer opportunities and those opening that exist will be even more competitive to get into.
2. Universities will cut way back on lab renovations, new facilities, and delay upkeep. Few people understand just how many tradespeople work on a university campus every day. This includes both facilities staff but also many outside contractors. This will have a major impact on blue collar jobs.
3. IT companies, biotechs, and scientific suppliers for whom universities are key clients are going to be hit hard. Expect layoffs and small companies to close up shop in this sector as the effects of research cuts percolate through the system.
jostmey
I see a lot of comments about Universities being inefficient, bloated with administrators, and that the cap on indirect rates is justified. I agree, but it is not as simple as made out to be.
I've worked at a university, startup, and large company. In terms of efficiency, startup > university > large company. In other words, large companies are less efficient than universities and universities are less efficient that startups.
I agree the grant overhead is ridiculous and that Universities are bloated with administrators. It felt like every 6 months, an administrator would find a previously unnoticed rule that would indicate my office placement violated some rule, and I would have to move. I think I went through three office moves. Ugh. On the other hand, universities provided time and resources for real work to get done
yongjik
The sudden cut on NIH funding is intended to maximize fear and chaos, and since this is NIH, the impact will be most felt in cutting-edge medical research. And I think that's precisely the point: Trump is in a rampage to destroy American institutions, his supporters hate higher education, and high-ranking research universities are a prime target.
Come on, are we supposed to discuss the finance of university administration as if this is some well-thought-out proposal to make America's universities be better and more efficient? Don't give in to the gaslighting. The barbarians have breached the gate and we're arguing whether torching down the main street would help us with next city council meeting.
mjfl
This is likely a temporary move, intended to be used for rhetoric. Eventually the faculty will complain, because they rely on large pyramids of postdocs and grad students for almost all labor. There’s simply no way to continue the work of university research without a strong supply of grad students. Once this is realized, and the NIH doesn’t bend, then grad admissions will increase again, and admin cuts will start, as they should.
sega_sai
Amazing commenters here -- for them people are like cattle. "Temporary move". Graduate students without an offered position -- it's nothing, they'll just wait a bit. Cut one funding one day, maybe release later.
mjfl
I didn’t say it’s a good thing. I think it’s dishonest and manipulative.
osnium123
That or the volume of research will simply shrink and world class research will take place only in China.
It's pretty telling that schools like Penn don't cut their administrators, but instead they cut their admissions.
"Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment which grew by 78%.
When we look at individual schools the numbers are just as striking. A recent report I authored found that on average, the top 50 schools have 1 faculty per 11 students whereas the same institutions have 1 non-faculty employee per 4 students. Put another way, there are now 3 times as many administrators and other professionals (not including university hospitals staff), as there are faculty (on a per student basis) at the leading schools in country."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/admini...