2025 Hiring Pause

> "The ratio of staff to students is nearly 1:1"

> "This is insane."

"This expansion is largely at the School of Medicine, where the yearly staff growth rate of 5.6% is significantly higher than the 1.7% rate across the rest of the University...

School of Medicine spokesperson Courtney Lodato wrote that the increase largely includes clinical educators who teach and provide clinical care, financed by external research funds from government and industry sources"

Total staff numbers are only marginally useful without further breakdown, as that article points out.

A family member works for an eatery at a large university. Technically they are employees (staff) of the university, but pretty much in name only. They work for a business unit which receives no financial support from the university. They are profitable on their own and if they aren’t, they would close down. They are provided benefits via the university, but it is part of their budget. Including them in the count relative to students is about as useful as including the employees of the (independent) Starbucks on campus.

(It’s not Stanford, so I can’t speak to that specific institution)

What is "staff"? Is there a break down on how much "staff" is involved in research tasks vs admin tasks? Research nowadays is complex and requires a lot of technical support, a lot of people who are hired as technical-administrative stuff may do actually purely research tasks [0]. As usually faculty captures people in some "professorship" level, it completely misses this big crowd of research-related work.

[0] source: me

Without knowing more about the numbers, the only one I have an issue with is the number of students. These universities should be doing everything they can to increase enrollment and let in more students.

I went to a smaller school in my city, but at the time most everyone I know who applied got it. I would not get it today, and people end up wait listed, etc... IMO, that is the failing of the US higher education system. Next is cost to the student.

from the article you linked:

> Stanford also has unique characteristics that create high staff headcount, former Provost Persis Drell told the Faculty Senate during a May 2023 meeting: Unlike other institutions, Stanford requires more staff to maintain Stanford Research Park, a large housing portfolio and other facilities.

from one of the sources [0] that paragraph linked to:

> It’s also important to understand how Stanford defines terms used in headcount growth since those definitions vary widely among research universities, Drell noted. For example, clinician educators, which have grown significantly in number, are categorized as “staff” at Stanford, while at other universities they are often counted as “faculty.” In addition, and in contrast to many other institutions, Stanford has chosen to focus more on hiring staff in many areas rather than using outside contractors whose employees would not count as Stanford staff.

and from [1] also linked in the above paragraph:

> We recognize that stable, affordable housing is critical for student success. Stanford guarantees housing for undergraduates for all four years and provides housing for over 70% of graduate students. We also provide as much as three times more student housing than large universities across California in similarly constrained housing markets.

given the context, it seems perfectly reasonable that Stanford would have more "staff" employees than the University of Southwestern North Dakota, even normalized for different numbers of student enrollment.

0: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2023/05/provost-provides-d...

1: https://housinginfo.stanford.edu/by-the-numbers

> 281% increase in total staff

Nit: 181% increase

I do wonder what percentage of said "staff" are really just students working to fulfill student responsibility[1] for pennies on the dollar.

[1] https://financialaid.stanford.edu/undergrad/how/student.html

This is also the fallacy of looking at one metric.

Do staff include productive researchers producing net positive incoming?

Other comments mention the medical school. Are these staff providing patient care (and billing insurance)?

University staff aren’t necessarily just your traditional educators. A whole lot of productive stuff (both for the university and everyone else) can potentially benefit from “staff.”

virtually every sector of the economy has 'excess staff;' it is not confined to higher ed. It's the obvious conclusion of decades of automation not being realized as less working hours, but in the dilution of responsibilities into more complicated and larger corporate apparatuses. Some of them are called "bullshit jobs" some of them are given credibility, while being utterly purposeless ultimately. This is largely ignored as a general trend because it is usually contextualized to a narrative within each company (as is the case here) rather than seen as a larger phenomenon.

This is the inevitable conclusion of unprecedented concentration of capital, which is not new but only being revealed during a time of seemingly limitless automation potential.

You don’t spent an endowment, you spend the interest. The entire research budget comes from outside funding. In Cornell’s case, the research funding amounts to $1B a year.

Just for perspective, the annual research budget of a university I looked at the numbers for recently (not Cornell, but R1) would go through that in less than two decades, even if it were completely dedicated to research and nothing else.

With an optimistic 10% annual return, this would amount to 1/5 of Cornell's budget.

And according to the same text, $5.8B in annual operating costs.

And what? You know that for example endowment funds have restrictions on what they can be spent on.

This is really victim blaming. I would not have an issue if the government has said that for future grant rounds there will be limits on overheads, but this lot just decided they cut already agreed and planned budgets and no matter the consequences.

Reminder that endowments are highly illiquid and typically are not used to fund budgets

The government should levy an 80% tax on this and use it to pay for student loan forgiveness.

It's all about the choices. Post secondary schools had easy money (student loans, grants, expanding endowments) and rapidly expanding enrollment for decades. It seems many schools thought that would continue, but we saw enrollment plateau and even decrease. Ivy schools have options - lower prestige to increase enrollment, or lean on prestige and endowments to raise prices. Other schools will likely cut staff/services and increase class sizes. I went to a state school and their enrollment has dropped 25% since I was there. It seems tuition went up, state funding per student is higher (not sure if total is the same or higher), some upgrades were put off, and some services seem to have been scaled back.

> I felt the 2025 market would get worse but never thought to have "(potential) mass government layoff" on my bingo card.

I'm curious if this is because you never heard about what was in Project 2025, or didn't think Trump would win, or didn't think he would enact it?

As well as MIT https://hr.mit.edu/jobs

I assume they, like most orgs, make a planning based on some available budget. If the budget gets higher, they will expand. If it gets lower, they will reduce their expenses/spread. I also assume that the reduction of overhead in particular is gonna hurt such institutions _a lot_ because they have exactly planned based on that.

I cannot speak about Cornell specifically, I do not know if they have a bloated administration or superfluous expenses. But the truth is that admin stuff are necessary for supporting education and research. Having been in universities during admin reforms reducing admin stuff (claiming that they make "smart restructuring") it always negatively affects work done in the university in one way or another. Usually, it means that research staff will have to pick up some of the admin work themselves, or be offered less support doing it. As research staff are usually paid more than admin stuff, that is not necessarily effective (unless it is assumed that research stuff will be working overtime anyway). In any case, it does not seem like an efficient move most of the times, even if it seems so to the bureaucrats who make these plans.

I imagine they are, but they will still have some mindset of a business and cut spending in lieu of economic headwinds. Like pretty much every industry in the last few years.

I think the ivies will be fine. It's 99% of other universities without 10b in endowments I'm worried about.

you got the academic and economics right. but ignored the politics. academic politics is very exclusive... and the circle in it owns lots of capital. so when capital goes on strike, they fall in line.

Let's say a University has $1m in the bank. In this case, they decide to use it to "endow" a "chaired professorship" to retain some top faculty member. The reason it works - the professor stays at said University - is because they give the professor the proceeds from the endowment (usually, this is like 5% expected rate of return, or in this case, $50k), which he/she uses for their research.

So now, should the University instead reallocate funds like that, thus (perhaps) losing top faculty, to (marginally) lower tuition?

Similarly, imagine a university raises millions of dollars for scholarships. Once again, they use the proceeds to fund the scholarships. Should they instead use the principal (as you're kind of suggesting), thus eventually running out of funds, or should they keep the endowment, and thus keep giving out scholarships?

Before condemning endowments, it would be better to first understand how they're being used. For example, if you found out that some large fraction was for student scholarships, would that change your position?

(to be clear, I'm not particularly on one side or the other here; I just think more nuanced positions are needed...)

> rip students off with sky-high tuition while sitting on huge endowments

As has been mentioned elsewhere, sitting on endowments is what you're supposed to do—you don't burn through the principal, you spend the interest. The point of an endowment is to provide a sustainable baseline income to keep the school going forever, it's not like an investment round where you're expected to use up the runway in an effort to reach profitability through other income streams.

> It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums.

Depending on which sports you're talking about and which schools, this might actually be an example of an investment that is expected to yield a return. At a lot of schools the sports programs subsidize the academics, so having a nice and roomy football stadium is actually a pretty sound investment into income streams that benefit everyone, even students with no interest in football.

>but I think it's well past time to revoke the tax-exempt status of schools that rip students off with sky-high tuition while sitting on huge endowments

As other people have mentioned in this thread, the point of endowments is to provide a steady source of income for the university's activities, not a piggy bank you can raid.

>It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums.

I'm sure the right is equally mad about universities "blowing money" on humanities programs as well. Should we get rid of those as well?

>If anything in any country should be free, it should be education.

I can't tell you're being serious or you're being hyperbolic for the sake of defending education. Most people, given the choice would rather get free food, water, or healthcare.

If anything in any country should be free, it should be education.

It's called The Internet.

It’s never free. People in Europe say it is when they want to take a jab at the USA. But the reality is that earning potential is severely limited in Europe. And let’s not pretend that every degree obtained is beneficial to society. People get degrees with no marketable skills all the time. And the losses are distributed among all the taxpayers.

From the sound of it, a whole bunch of them.

> This move comes as Cornell and 11 other universities have filed a lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health over funding restrictions that could cost Cornell $80 million.

This is less than 0.75% of Cornell's endowment, so I'm not sure there is a strong case for causation here.