The Financial Squeeze on Higher Ed
The Trump administration’s plan to place severe limitations on what universities receive in indirect costs from grants from the National Institute of Health (though temporarily blocked*), as well as cuts the administration has made to various granting and education-related agencies, has higher education on guard, and several institutions are taking steps to limit expenditures.
[photo of “Floor”, an installation by Do Ho Suh]
Has your institution implemented admissions cuts, hiring freezes, or similar measures? Let us know in the comments.
What implications do these cuts have for what individual researchers and teachers, job candidates, and PhD applicants should be doing? Some have recommended that job candidates accept offers quickly, as it’s not unheard of, even in less chaotic times, for deans and provosts to decide they’ve spent enough money that season and to cancel searches.
Your thoughts and suggestions are welcome.
* One reader notes: “The restraining order on NIH cuts has had a limited effect because the administration ordered NIH not to publish calls in the Federal Registry, and without that, nothing can proceed.”
If I recall correctly, both Boston University and Columbia paused their grad admission this year (although before Trump was sworn into office).
The Columbia pause was the philosophy department only and was because of a very high yield in the previous year’s entering class, so I don’t think that was related or anything to do with the financial health of the university. (I could be wrong about this but it is what they said on the department website.)
I’m pretty sure BU did it as an entire university “in response” to grad student unionization.
The New School for Social Research is moving forward with business as usual for this year.
Honestly, pausing philosophy grad admissions is a good idea, for independent, ethical reasons. There are too many phds and too few jobs (something many lament but few do anything about). This means many youths (the unlucky ‘surplus’ phds) are spending much of their 20s making minimum wage, not accumulating savings, perhaps postponing having a family (for females with finite fertility, this is especially tragic)–all for the sake of a job that they are unlikely to get. Why do these poor souls consent to this situation? Arguably, they don’t, at least insofar as 22-year-olds (the age I entered my phd program) are vulnerable and not great decision-makers. My 22yo self didn’t think about the opportunity costs when starting a phd. My 29yo self would not have made the same choice. Some number of prospective grad students will be temporarily disappointed about not getting into a phd program this year, but someday, their 29yo selves may well be glad.
Maybe everything you say about the best interests of applicants is right, but it can’t be about lack of consent. People in their 20s can embark on all sorts of careers and life-changing endeavours and it’s extremely infantilising to say that they can’t consensually do so. I guess I was lucky to get a job but I resent the idea that someone should have made the choice whether to gamble for me. Besides, the odds of a career are tough in many demanding domains – academics tend to vastly exaggerate the difficulties. Try being a ballet dancer, violinist, top judge, journalist… And it’s not like philosophy PhDs are consigned to penury after finishing, people end up in various professions even if not as academics.
My point was less that 20-somethings can’t consent to anything (clearly false), more that they may often fail to appreciate the gravity of buying a 40% lottery ticket at the cost of one’s twenties. There’s such a thing as tainted consent, and consent can be tainted by ignorance. 20-somethings are generally dumber and less wise about what’s important in life than 30-somethings. If you convince my 20yo self to do something that you know my 30yo self would not willingly do, isn’t that wrong?
Similar point, different context: I think it’s wrong to let 18-year-olds borrow $200,000 in loans to get a private school degree in art history. Why? Because teenagers are dumb and don’t understand the magnitude of the debt they’re taking on. If they did understand, they wouldn’t do it (or would major in business, or would go to a public school).
About the point that surplus philosophy phds are getting non-academic jobs, of course they are . . . just not jobs they couldn’t have gotten sooner, perhaps right out of undergrad. The marginal utility of a philosophy master’s vs. a philosophy phd is almost nil.
“spending much of their 20s making minimum wage, not accumulating savings”
AKA
getting to learn and to enjoy life, on someone else’s dime. what a hard time I had those 6 years. if only i had were working a 9-5 in my 20s, so i could have accumulated savings
It sounds nice when you put it that way. The reality is that the production of surplus phds benefits universities (cheap labor) and professors (TAs) more than it benefits the surplus phds themselves (they got paid enough to stay alive for 5-7 years, and along the way obtained a license to be a professor, which will now go unused). Universities, professors, and surplus phds are less “friends with benefits” and more “we benefit while you don’t exactly get worse off, but definitely incur opportunity costs.”
If you think of graduate school as merely a job training program, yes, you should skip it.
Hi. As one of the folks you describe, not likely to find any particularly prestigious jobs, I disagree with your framing of the situation. I wouldn’t trade my time spent on my studying for basically any realistic professional opportunity. I know this is not necessarily rational, and I recognize that I stand to be criticized for having bad values or preferences. But given that I have the preferences I have, the opportunity to study the big ideas that captivate me and apply myself towards my studies brings me a sense of satisfaction and purpose that I have a hard time imagining I would find in corporate affairs. Pursuing my PhD has brought me a level of self-respect and self-confidence and satisfaction that I might not achieve otherwise. Keep in mind that this is just likely a corollary of my general lease on life. If I hadn’t discovered philosophy I might well be working a dead-end job while applying myself to music or writing or something else that is creative and empowering without enabling financial independence. You can tell me that I am foolish and being exploited by my PhD granting institution, and that may well be true but is compatible with what I know to be true: that I am glad that folks worried about my well-being didn’t thwart my opportunities to continue my studies.
That seems patronising to me. Young people should not be told what careers to pursue by older people (even in their late 20s ;)).
And in a similar vein: perhaps a 50 year-old you will be glad you’ve spent your 20s doing exciting and valuable things despite being underpaid. Or, to put it slightly differently, how likely you think a 50 year-old possible you, who hadn’t gone to the graduate school, would regret not following their gut when they were young? These are really speculative thoughts, but–you know–“many such cases…”
I certainly don’t want anyone to feel patronized. But older people giving advice to younger people is a good idea. I’ve told my little brother–whose well-being I care about quite a lot–many times not to do a phd. Unfortunately, he didn’t listen!
While I agree that there are good reasons to reduce the number of Ph.D. students admitted to programs without funding, this justification veers close to Montgomery Burns’s “the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business” speech.
If I trained people to run steam engines knowing that there were no jobs running steam engines outside of a few museums or teaching still more people to run steam engines, it would be innocuous to point out that at some point I would have an ethical obligation to refrain from continuing to train the same number of people to run steam engines for an ever decreasing set of jobs.
The only question is, where are we visa-a-via the number of trainees versus the number of steam engines? It doesn’t seem crazy to say maybe somebody needs to cut back on steam engine training, at least for a bit.
Right, and there’s no need to invoke the poor decision-making skills of twenty-year-olds (which has implications beyond opportunity costs they might incur studying philosophy) or the (tragic!) loss of fertile breeding years to make this argument.
You’re missing an important difference: most people who pursue a PhD in philosophy do so because they find doing philosophy inherently valuable. I’ve never met anyone who felt extrinsic pressure to become a philosopher. (If anything, quite the opposite.) If some people love steam engines and want to learn how to run them, I don’t see what’s wrong with teaching them how. From this perspective, the fact that some of them will become professional steam engine operators or educators is a bonus.
The advice that I got and that I give is to only enroll in a PhD program if you expect you will find the degree and experience valuable without an academic job. If people follow this advice, then I think it’s likely that the disappointment they might experience at 30 if they don’t get a job will be replaced with pride, appreciation of a unique expertise, and fond memories later in life (just like Graduate Student above says). If people aren’t sure how they will feel, then an MA program is a great place to test the waters.
Personally, I find it difficult to imagine that I will ever regret pursuing my passion in my 20s. Graduate-level philosophy is so much more interesting than undergraduate philosophy. I met and befriended incredibly interesting and impressive people. And I think it’s made me a better person outside of my career. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way. I wouldn’t want to deprive people that experience on the basis of what the overall job market is like.
First off, great point, Zach. It’s good to do what one finds intrinsically worthwhile, and of course some surplus phds will have no regrets about their choice. I’m more thinking of the people who do get to the end, realize they’re among the surplus, and realize their passion for philosophy could have been satiated by philosophizing as a hobby, in their free time, while pursuing a more conventional career.
I got this advice too. In fact I distinctly remember telling my undergrad advisor “I don’t care if I work at McDonald’s after grad school; I just love philosophy and want to be paid to do it.”
Was I telling the truth? At the time, yes. But I was 22. At 29, my values have changed (still love philosophy, but philosophizing need not be a career).
Not only did my values change; I would contend that they changed in predictable ways. We know 20-somethings are more likely to say stuff like “My passion for X burns so hot that sacrificing financial security and a family is worth it.” 30-somethings (who have grown up a bit) are less likely to say that.
Not everyone’s values will change like mine did. But for a predictable portion of people, this will happen. And overeducating these people (i.e. making them surplus phds) isn’t doing them favors. If fewer surplus phds were being produced, this would be less of a problem. Those whose values will change from 22 to 29 would still get a job.
I think actual philosophical training at a top-notch university, among a group of peers similarly interested, is incredibly superior to philosophizing “in one’s free time”—- there’s really no comparison.
Yes, people’s values change, and maybe one day someone will think “I wish I had spent my twenties coding at a desk so that I had saved up money” … but, I don’t know, maybe those later, security-motivated values kind of suck. You might be *wrong* to value your nest egg over actual intellectual exploration in a community of like-minded people.
As far as family/fertility, we should encourage people to have children while in graduate school. It’s a great time to have children. No one should sacrifice family for philosophy or for an career. If there are people out there telling graduate students to wait til they get a degree to have a family, then they are wrong and should stop.
Perhaps the typical reason one would study philosophy for years is different from the typical reason one would train to run a steam engine…
I find the claim about this being especially tragic
to be deeply troubling.
A valuable life is not necessarily one where one maximizes one’s reproductive output. Lots of ‘females’ lead good lives without having babies, irrespective of philosophy phds, and lots of ‘females’ finish grad school having had the number of children they desired.
I will also add that having children under economic uncertainty is going to be par for the course for pretty much all millennial+ generations, given (*gestures broadly at the world*). All the millennial women I know who have had babies did so later (that is, in their 30s) than their moms (and their moms) despite most of them having non-academic jobs.
I guess I worry about the paternalism or flourishing concerns noted below, but also the implicit potential worry that only people whose fertility is unaffected by age (e.g., “males”) should spend their 20s in grad school, putting off accruing capital. That sounds dangerous and exclusionary.
Agree 100%. I would add that the concern with “finite fertility” not only makes the false assumption that childbearing is requisite to flourishing, but also assumes that biological children are/should be the norm. For anyone capable of adopting children, insisting on biological children arguably carries significant moral opportunity costs.
I think you read much more into my “female fertility” comment than was there. Being happy doesn’t require “maximizing one’s reproductive output” (lots of priests and nuns are happy, presumably), but having kids is a known source happiness, and not having kids (or having fewer than one wanted) is a known source of regret. Insofar as many phds postpone having kids until they graduate (for obvious financial reasons), having kids is among the potential opportunity costs of grad school. If you land a professor job (lucky phd), perhaps being childless or child-poor is worth it; if you don’t get the job (surplus phd), perhaps not. This is more of a problem for girls than boys, insofar as girls’ fertility decreases with age while boys’ doesn’t. Therefore, if–as I suggested in my original comment–it is unethical for universities to produce so many surplus phds, the distribution of harm disproportionately falls on girls. I never said only boys should go to grad school (that’s crazy). What I did say is universities ought to produce fewer surplus phds. Alternative solution: pay phds an $80k salary so people don’t postpone having kids (but this will never happen).
A below commenter points out that infertile people can always adopt. That’s a good piece of nuance to keep in mind, I admit. Not sure it resolves my worries completely. Adoption is great. My wife is adopted. We will likely adopt. But not everyone wants to adopt. And many people who struggle with fertility and grieve about this don’t find it fully consolatory that they can “just adopt.” Whether feeling this way is justified or simply shows a moral defect in one’s character, I don’t know.
“A valuable life is not necessarily one where one maximizes one’s reproductive output.”
Closet conservative obviously didn’t suggest otherwise. It’s not bad to point out that a potential opportunity cost is relatively unique to women, even if the use of “female” creeps you out.
I don’t think he meant to say that people without children cannot lead valuable lives. I think his point is that if people some day realize that they want children, but are now in a much more difficult position to have them, they will be frustrated. And for purely biological reasons, women have a greater risk of that happening to them.
My career did not go as I had hoped, but my years of graduate school were the best investment of time and effort in my life. This is on account of the intellectual stimulation as well as the earning of the PhD, an accomplishment that I will proudly have for the rest of my life. Being able to have a somewhat (but not very) successful career teaching was a wonderful thing, too, but if I have any regrets it’s about caring too much about getting and keeping an academic job. Many young people make awful choices with a decent chance of irrevocably ruining their lives (enlisting in the US military is an example – although for some it works out well). There is something to be said for respecting a person’s freedom to make bad choices. Also, not having children is hardly “tragic.”
I had three kids while in graduate school, and many of my fellow graduate students did the same. Is it really still the case that people think that graduate school is NOT a good time to have kids?
Maybe mine was a particularly family-friendly program, but if the problem is that people aren’t given the freedom/resources to have children in graduate school, maybe we should change the environment at graduate schools rather than gripe about how many surplus PhDs there are. Insofar as people are under the impression that their (potential) children must be sacrificed at the philosophy-altar, we are failing — this has nothing to do with surplus PhDs, that’s a tragedy for anyone, whether they get a TT job or not.
Are the NIH overhead cuts a reduction in total grant revenue, or a reduction in the funding associated with each particular grant (which would simply allow more grants, where each grant has lower overhead costs)?
Looks like the former. “The NIH projected the cut will save $4 billion during the current federal fiscal year, which ends September 30. That’s nearly half of the $9 billion that the NIH said it set aside for overhead through the indirect cost rate”. There’s also some stuff there about biotech share prices falling for companies with NIH indirect funding exposure.
The government is also arguing in court that it’s the latter. If I had to guess, I would say the actual result will be the former, and that the government is lying about even trying to achieve the latter. But, it’s also conceivable that there are people in the Trump administration working towards the former and others working towards the latter. I suspect there’s a fair amount of divergence within the executive branch in terms of what’s to be done, how to do it, etc. It seems like kind of a mess over there…
Administrative bloat in universities has been a topic of conversation for at least the last decade. What is to be done about the proliferation of vice-jr-associate deans, provosts, chairs, and chancellors, each of whom is taking in maybe four times the salary of regular faculty? The move to reduce the funds going to admin and other overhead to 15% of NIH grants seems to take aim at this very problem — maybe some institutions need this kind of external kick in the pants.
It seems to me that most of what we are all reading, especially re the negative effects of this new rule about how funds are to be allocated, is coming from the same parts of the university business apparatus that would be on the chopping block. There is a way to keep all the money — that would be to divert more of the NIH funds to the costs directly associated with research (not sure how that is defined or if it’s defined well/fairly in the order).
Of course less money for a university is less money. But I think it would definitely be going against the spirit of these funds if they were substantially subsidizing e.g. philosophy departments! Hopefully the university decision makers see that the humanities would be the wrong target for cutbacks.
The indirect funding for grants doesn’t go to any of that. The grant recipients must submit a detailed accounting of all the needs for the research, which does not go to random university bureaucrats.
Never having applied for NIH funding myself, it looks like it is possible that the indirect funds go to random university bureaucrats. A lot of proposals just multiply the allowable indirect cost rate by the ‘modified total direct costs’ to get a number for whatever extra funds they are requesting. And these indirect costs include ‘general administration and general expenses, such as the salaries and expenses of executive officers, personnel administration, and accounting’.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/subtitle-A/subchapter-A/part-75/subpart-E/subject-group-ECFR1eff2936a9211f7/section-75.414
https://grants.nih.gov/grants-process/write-application/samples-applications-and-documents
Aren’t the indirect costs outside of the accounting for the grant?
Yes, that is what the practice of multiplying the ‘modified total direct costs’ by the ‘indirect costs rate’ to come up with the final number would imply. So, if you think you need 100k to cover your direct costs, and your negotiated indirect cost rate is 0.29, say, you would submit a detailed budget for 100k, and the institution would receive 129k.
In practice, apparently not. I also assumed so, but happen to be related to someone with experience applying for an receiving NIH grants, and they informed me that this is not the case. In reality, even the indirect costs must ultimately be accounted for in the grant structure.
Administrative bloat has been a talking point of the left and the right for about 15 years since the publication of a book called The Fall of The Faculty which claimed to find gigantic increases in the numbers of administrators relative to tenure line faculty, by spectacularly failing to understand that most of that increase was the result of reclassification of jobs as administrative, and the changes in technology (eg we have far fewer gardeners and far more IT staff at Madison than we did when I got here 32 years ago; all of our front office staff are classified as admin now, whereas only 1 was 32 years ago etc…). So. I hope the lazy journalists and lazy academics who’ve perpetuated this are feeling good about themselves right now.
That’s not to say that it wouldn’t be a good time to rethink the relationship between federal government and research: the overhead rates seem excessive and probably do subsidize other parts of the operation and if the feds don’t want to do that they should say so, and set a different rate for future contracts, and maybe reduce the massive amount of red tape universities need to hire administrators to cut through in order to administer federal grants. Like — honour its own legal contracts. But of course this isn’t about any of that; it’s about showing universities (and everyone else) that the federal government can’t be relied upon to keep its promises. Just like US foreign policy.
I actually wasn’t aware that the administrative bloat talking point was inaccurate, or an exaggeration. I thought it was the standard way to explain the fact that since the 1980s, tuition increases at U.S. universities have outpaced inflation by a ratio of 3 to 1. If you can suggest further reading on this, or a critical review of the book you mentioned, I would be interested.
The Delta Cost Project (https://www.air.org/project/delta-cost-project) is the best reference I know of on where all the money goes.
The state of California was having lower than expected revenues prior to Trump, which Gov. Newsom has translated into less money for universities, which will definitely affect all UC and CSU hiring in CA next year. That combined with some bad decisions on the part of the CSU system trustees and chancellor is resulting in dire issues at some campuses, like the closure of the entire philosophy department at Sonoma State. It’s hard to tell, but Trump’s cuts could exacerbate this, however it was going to slow down hiring of professors in CA no matter what.