In my department we have research staff to look at research proposals and make sure they're good before they're submitted to the grant agency.
Someone might look at the budget and say "This is administrative bloat because it is not teaching focused so we are cutting them."
What's the downstream effect? Well now those professors who relied on the research staff have to take time out of their schedules to do deeper reviews of their work, so they reduce teaching time and increase research time.
They are not as skilled as the dedicated staff, so now there are fewer proposals being accepted. This means less money to the university, and particularly the department.
So what does the department do? They stop hiring undergraduate graders and they institute a hiring freeze. Now that means they cannot admit as many students, teaching costs go up, class sizes go up. And for the admitted students, now they've lost their work study, so it means fewer students are going to enroll because their aid has decreased, effectively increasing tuition. This can be a vicious downward spiral if not checked.
So the original intent of "tighten belts and reduce waste" is really "we made everything worse for everyone"
If every university were subject to similar constraints, the average "quality" of research proposals would go down (everybody would have less time to spend on it) but since the pool of research dollars is assumed constant everyone would still get roughly their same slice - just with less overhead.
How it would actually work is only the best schools would keep their funding while lower tier schools would be shut out entirely and be forced to severely reduce their research agendas. There's a school near me that just went from College to University status because they grew their graduate program enough, they would probably not weather the storm the same as MIT.
On a system's level, that's probably the desired outcome in a world where total science funding is shrinking and fewer people can be employed as scientists.
In your example, I'd be more worried about the case where the specialized design reviewer knows what the available sources of grants are and procedure to apply to them, and the professor has since forgotten that knowledge, and so the department now cannot bring in any grants or revenue. That'd kill science even at established institutions like MIT or Yale or Harvard, even if they have very good researchers.
I agree there are real problems in higher education. But the explanation that universities simply became bloated because student loan money was too easy is very incomplete.
At universities like MIT, Stanford and others, many undergraduates do not pay anything close to sticker price. Students from lower and middle income families often receive major aid, and in some cases pay no tuition at all. Full tuition is paid mostly by wealthy families and international students. I myself went to the most expensive university in the country circa 2005, but paid less than state school because they gave me a bunch of grants (not mere loans). For this reason, undergraduate education is mostly break even or a loss leader at many institutions.
Tuition inflation is also tied to inequality. If very wealthy families can pay $60k-$90k a year out of pocket, elite universities can set prices at that level, acting as upward price pressure in the broader market. That's just the magic of the market dynamics at work.
> I went to the college directory of my own college and was amazed at the number of administrative staff relative to teaching staff.
Some bureaucracy may be wasteful, but some exists because modern research universities are genuinely complex institutions. Yes, fewer administrators are tied to teaching, but a professor's job is only about 30% teaching, and classes are not in session 25% of the year. I never understand this idea that all or most of the administrative staff at a university must go toward teaching or else something is wrong / broken.
Large universities are small research communities verging on city status, not mere schools. If you want mere schools we have those in various forms (SLACs, community colleges, trade schools, etc.), but it seems to me people also want all the advanced stuff coming out of the research output these universities produce. The higher the tower of knowledge, the more it's going to cost to build on and maintain it, and the costs don't go up linearly.
> And you have universities complaining about how they don't have enough funding for research and they need MOOAAR.
Research is also and expensive loss leader. Labs, buildings, equipment, safety systems, compliance, grant administration all cost a lot of money, to the point that research is also a loss leader. At my institution we charge about 65% overhead on research grants, but for every research dollar we bring in, it costs 70 more cents for the university to support said research.
The upside is that these universities produce enormous value in the form of scientific discoveries, medical advances, new startups, an educated workforce, and regional economic growth. They bring in foreign and nonlocal money and spend much of it locally. Many of them are economic engines in places that otherwise would be considered "flyover country", acting as an anchor for educators and their families, students, and that attracts hospitals, other schools, restaurants, and suddenly a local economy is formed. You think there would be any economic activity at State College, PA if it weren't for Penn State University? It'd just be another part of Pennsyltucky. Instead there's a whole thriving town there; per capita, State College is in the top 5 economic regions in PA, and Penn State as a whole accounts for 10% of employment in PA (it's not a coincidence the other top 4 economic regions in PA are full of colleges and universities).
So yes, universities should control costs, reduce administrative excess, and protect students from bad debt like you said. But simply starving them of funding risks damaging one of America’s most productive assets. The better goal is a funding model that reduces student debt, preserves world-class research, demands accountability, and recognizes that valuable institutions are not cheap to run. But that's not what's happening, not even close.
Most universities subsidize their undergraduate program using graduate and professional degrees. And these degrees are often glorified immigration programs. Yes, even at elite universities.
It's true that master's degree programs and professional degrees help subsidize undergraduate degrees, and that's a good thing for several reasons. First, it brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars to local communities to help educate Americans. Second, it creates lasting bonds between America and the peoples of foreign nations; either the students learn and stay here to create value in America, or they go back home and bring with them American values and (hopefully if the program did their job right) a good view of Americans and America. If the only things we export are bombs and war, that reflects poorly on us as a country. Third, it means that when the world's top talent aspires to come to America rather than some other country for their education. Fourth, their presence in a local community creates demand for services and goods, and the fact there is constant churn creates enough sustained demand to support local economies in remote areas.
Really I don't see many downsides unless you're leaning heavily on the idea immigration is a bad thing for America.
> And these degrees are often glorified immigration programs.
I think you'll need to support that statement with a better argument.
That's an interpretation, not a fact. And “glorified immigration program” is not a neutral factual label because it implies the educational function is mostly pretextual. I can understand your perspective, but please stop pretending to me that you're simply making factual statements and not a value judgement.
It is pretextual for a lot of foreign students, I don't know how anyone can deny that in good faith. Its definitely not a value judgements because I never said whether it's a good or bad thing on net. Sometimes good things have to be smuggled through a pretext.
"pretextual for a lot of foreign students" means something very different from "these degrees are often glorified immigration programs", which is how you entered the discussion. Can you at least admit that if you're here in good faith?
Yes I'll admit that these statements imply different things. But I maintain that advanced degrees at American universities are functionally an immigration program and that this is unspoken yet by design
Yes and no, it depends on the program. I definitely agree when you get to choose your students it's a lot easier. But as far as course content, maybe not chemistry or calculus, but for capital-intense programs like robotics definitely. At CMU, there was a class students could take where each group gets to use a $15k humanoid robot (Aldebaran Nao) for the semester. When you take a class on super computing there, you get terminal access to a super computing cluster for your homework assignments. That's just not something you get at every school.
Moreover, when it comes to teaching load, some schools you have a course load of 4-5 classes each semester, maybe more; whereas at other schools you only have to teach 0-2 classes. There's a big difference in the amount of face time you get with a professor who has 300 students versus 30. Also there are big differences on whether a school can attract enough grad students for TAs, whether there are research opportunities for undergraduates, whether there are campus jobs for undergraduates, etc.
You're absolutely right, capital-intense programs may make a difference.
E.g. while during the cold war US excelled in multiple chemical fields like photonics or organic chemistry, the Soviets smartly focused on less capital intensive ones like electrochemical chemistry and they excelled there.
But I hope you understand my perspective: I've graduated at a university nobody has ever heard about and at no point in my chemistry career I was anywhere behind in preparation to people from top tier colleges.
And the fact that this gets repeated endlessly and taken at face value is a gigantic distortion of what makes an individual prepared, because there's way too many variants.
I can easily stand by "on average ivy leagues produce better graduates", but there's no chance in hell I will ever buy the "top educators" argument. It's plain and simply false, with 0 hard data to back it up.
On top of that, this is repeated by the people that attended those very institutions but had no experience of how it is elsewhere.
If you've graduated like me, you know very well that each program has a wide variety of different educators. Hell, even the same university from year to year may change who holds what, with dramatic differences in the quality of teaching or difficulty and requirements to pass an exam.
I had an easy time doing Organic Chemistry 2, but those who enrolled just an year prior had to scale the Everest just to pass the exam. The reverse was true in calculus. And this is the same all over the world.
It's a tempting thought but play it out. Now you live next to a belligerent fascist theocracy with nukes who likes to invade foreign countries and aspires to control the entire western hemisphere from Canada to Chile. How does that end?
That may well be true but it's not the whole story. My department has been hiring continuously for 15 years, and there have been more than a few years we have not been able to hire anyone because the applicant pool was underqualified. So while it's true there aren't enough jobs for everyone, there are still jobs for those who want them enough to get the qualifications for them (your field may vary).
I don't think what I said is tautological, so let me rephrase.
I think it's a mistake to leave a field early solely because there are fewer jobs than people with the relevant degree. Not all jobs are created equal, and not all degree-holders are equally competitive for all jobs. Some positions have a hiring bar far above having a qualifying degree. It also helps to realize that programs graduate C and D students all the time.
So it can both be true that there aren't enough jobs for everyone with the degree, and also that the market is not saturated with qualified candidates for particular jobs.
> Isn't the point that we might think that getting a terminal degree would qualify a person for some kind of job in their field?
As you climb the ladder, competition gets fiercer. At the terminal-degree level, having the degree is the baseline expectation. Not having it may be enough to disqualify you, but having it is not enough to make you competitive, because your peers also have terminal degrees. A terminal degree may qualify you in the credentialing sense, but it does not guarantee that you meet the hiring bar for a particular position, or that there is sufficient demand for your specialization at the wages, locations, and conditions you want.
It's not a qualification, it's a competition. It's not like there is a minimum bar to meet and everyone who meets it gets to go in. It's like "We have 10 seats, so we take the 10 best people who apply". Your qualification is that you have to be one of the 10 best people, however good they are.
its a different relationship entirely. you're hiring someone to mentor grad students, get grants, and teach. and while you aren't given tenure right away, that's certainly the goal, which can be a multi-decade commitment. everyone is trying to raise the bar with their program, and a couple 'meh' hires can really change that trajectory for quite a while. there are only like 20 faculty in your department, its not like development a giant tech co where there are tens of thousands and they are constantly moving in and out - each of these hires has a dramatic impact on your culture.
so yes, it absolutely makes sense to leave slots empty if you don't find candidates that you're excited about.
> While most of the US AI sphere will collapse under the pressure of making profits
I think deep down, sama knows this and that's why he's pushing for "Universal Basic Compute", which really means forcing every US citizen to become an OpenAI subscriber.
In the rare case that all your concepts use the exact same descriptive word, you are probably right!
The majority of the time you can infer the type from reading well written code (to the extent that the shape of the type matters in the context of that piece of code)
If the type can be inferred by the reader it should be inferred by the type system and at least be available to the LLM as a query. But we're also talking about dynamic languages in which type cannot be inferred until runtime. What's the type of x?
x = y + z
Well that depends on the types of y and z, which themselves may depend on the types of other operands, which themselves may not be known until the program actually runs. All that inference takes a lot of thinking, which takes tokens, which cost money. Why not just write the types down? Although we call these things "inference engines" they're really pattern matching explicit tokens, so it's better to actually write down the types so they can be pattern matched than to figure them out at inference time.
You are basically rehashing the false beliefs of the codeless programming camp.
Human language that is 99% correct is a standing ovation for a speech writer while it is paying a cyber ransom as the software maker.
The repetition and verbosity makes it more expensive for the LLM to write. You'd want a language that is expressive and dense if you're optimizing for token usage.
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