Really outrageous extortion. UCLA and UC as a whole are running budget deficits and facing reduced state support (as well as the grant cancelations). There's simply no money for this and the white house knows it.
That is not relevant to what I am saying at all. I am saying that there is no legal basis for demanding 1 Billion dollars in as that is 1) a made up number from Trump's head, 2) UCLA is innocent until proven guilty, 3) withholding Federal grants duly awarded violates impoundment.
How is the suspension of a research grant even related to a violation of title 9? It's bullshit, and everyone knows it, because it is actually extortionistic bullshit.
The particular type of fraud described here (paper mills etc.) is less common in the U.S. (different types of fraud may exist but that's more subtle and complex). There tend to be specific geographic clusters associated with this behavior that have to do with how university expansions have been done in many countries.
Oddly enough, pre-LLMs, I would have said most of these crap paper mill papers didn't really affect the actual fields. Yes, they cited each other but outside the citation ring didn't really alter the field in a knowledge sense. But now.. if these get picked up in Deep Research it's a problem.
It’s interesting how hard and widespread a push they’re making in advertising this - at this particular moment, when there are
rumors of more high level recruitment attempts / successes by Zuck. OpenAI is certainly a master at trying to drive narratives. (Independent of the actual significance / advance here). Sorry, there are too many hundreds of billions of dollars involved to not be a bit cautious and wary of claims being pushed this hard.
To those saying all you need is a lot of radiators.. remember that the radiators themselves gain heat from both sunlight and the Earth itself. It is a surprisingly tricky problem and, yes, all heat can be dissipated to achieve a desirable set point given sufficiently large area. But it is certainly not easier than just having say an economizer and dropping the data center in Iceland or a cold place. Makes no sense
At least for many engineering and science disciplines a solution remains to force students to actually try to learn the material: in-class, closed book exams. Nothing is ideal, but this does force students to actually engage with the material and problems. They are welcome to use LLMs all they want to help them study (though they should be careful given how often I catch them making horrible mistakes in my discipline). But the assessment will be of them and their brain.
Public schools in the US get a relatively small fraction of their budget from state funding. The distinction between public and private is not as large or substantial as one might imagine.
For example the 10-campus UC system's total budget is $54 billion of which $4.6 billion comes directly from the state's general fund.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4998 - the federal funding here is the same as for private universities, to do research or other work in the form of contracts/ grants.
I have to wonder what DOGE (including the alleged wunderkind Farritor that all the SV VCs were hailing) is planning for NSF. It’s amazing the arrogance of these people, to walk in and just do “hulk smash” on decades of hard work, infrastructure and institutional capacity.
It's fairly straightforward really. Academics will work on whatever grant topics are available, most will do anything for money, so expect lots of grants on topics directly benefiting X.ai, Tesla, Neuralink, or SpaceX.
There's multiple reasons why what you said is just wrong.
First, if academics wanted to work on topics mandated by somebody else, they would go work in industry for that somebody, and earn much more money than they earn right now.
Second, most academic scientists do not do anything relevant to Musk's companies. Do you expect a chemist to pivot to self-driving cars? Or a pure mathematician to whatever X.ai is doing?
The only thing this will lead to is a destruction of American capacity to carry out independent scientific research.
> First, if academics wanted to work on topics mandated by somebody else, they would go work in industry for that somebody, and earn much more money than they earn right now.
Very few academics become principle investigators. Most every academic who's not a PI is working on something for that PI.
The vast majority of those working for a PI are students and postdocs, which are inherently trainee positions. Though, depending on the field and the PI, trainees may also have plenty of freedom to work on their own topics. If you want an actual career in the academia, the main options are becoming a PI or choosing a teaching-focused position. There are some staff scientists and similar, but such positions are rarer than tenured professors.
Do we live on the same planet? I understand that the point of being an academic is to always be learning, but there's no place on earth I know of that thinks of someone with a PhD as a trainee.
> the main options are becoming a PI or choosing a teaching-focused position. There are some staff scientists and similar, but such positions are rarer than tenured professors.
Implying that one gets a choice is bold. My understanding is that there's a job for about 1 in 10 postdocs in academia these days.
A postdoc is a training position, where the individual further develops their skills and tries to build an independent profile while being mentored by a more senior academic. PhDs who work in someone else's projects without focusing as much on personal development typically have other job titles, such as project scientist or staff scientist.
Receiving a doctorate does not mean that you have finished your training. Some countries have habilitations or higher doctorates, which can be understood as more formal versions of postdoctoral training. Medical doctors are expected to specialize and receive more training as residents. Other fields have similar arrangements, some more and others less formal. If a full career is 50 years and the job requires a high degree of specialization, it can make sense to use the first ~15 years for training.
The number of academics who achieve a 50 year career is vanishingly small. I can think of a handful I met in a decade. To call the other 99.9% of academia in-training is a bit of a mis-nomer, whether it's the accepted terminology or not. That was my point.
And my point was that academics whose primary job is doing research in someone else's project are even rarer than tenured professors in research universities.
A postdoc is primarily a career advancement position rather than something where you are expected to contribute full time. Such positions are also pretty rare. There are something like 70k postdocs in the US, vs. almost 190k tenured or tenure-track full-time faculty in research universities.
It's true that serial postdocs exist (though schools tend to have term limits and even limits on years since PhD on postdocs), but it is certainly intended to be a trainee role. Even postdocs with fancy fellowships generally have sponsors.
Sure, but PhD students are still working on topics that they (at least partially) choose. As a PhD student in the USA, you have choice over your advisor, and hence choice over your research niche. Within that niche, you don't necessarily have full control over your project, but it is in everyone's interest to align the project with the student's interests; nobody wants a project that was half-assed because the student hated working on it.
This is perhaps a simplistic observation, but Bhartrihari’s linguistic idealism connects with how LLMs and their apparent intelligence is fundamentally language-driven. He would argue that is sufficient since our reality is fundamentally linguistic in nature:
“ Bhartrihari tells us, ordinary language is a crystallization of something already implicit in reality. Reality itself is fundamentally linguistic, and what we think of as language—ordinary language, with its words and conceptual divisions—is just a devolution or fragmentation of this more primordial linguistic totality. This is precisely why, for Bhartrihari, the ultimate reality is shabdabrahman, a linguistic absolute. So this is a strong form of idealism: things in our experience, and all things in existence, are fundamentally linguistic. We have no access to anything outside of language and therefore no reason to assume that there is, or ever was, anything separate from it.”
OP here: I think the reason for reducing Ph.D. admissions is very simple and should be understandable to anyone who has ever been responsible for making payroll. We (at universities) have great uncertainty about future "revenue" (grants) with even funding for ongoing contracts/ grants not being guaranteed to come in next fiscal year. So we need to reduce expenses which are placed on the grants, the largest amount of which is paying for our trainees. The vast majority of universities in the US do not have extremely large endowments, and at least at the school I work at, the (very modest) endowment amounts that can be used for ongoing expenses already are.
I, as a PI, am not directly admitting anyone into my group this year to ensure I have enough funding to pay existing group members. We're hunkering down and making sure those we have now will be funded through the rest of their Ph.D. While this article is talking about program-level decisions, there is a bottom-up aspect as well - at my program and many others, we (faculty) directly admit students into our group and are often responsible for their salaries from day one. Many faculty are, at an individual level, making the same decision I am, to reduce or eliminate any admissions offers this year.
Edit: For reference, I am not at UPenn, but at a "typical" state school engineering program.
In theory it is less at risk, but in practice there may be fewer TAships due to general budget shortfalls and also more students competing for those spots.
I am on fellowship, but have already been warned where I am that TAships might be cut. New rules have been put in place for maximum number of years one can teach, whereas it used to be a requirement that we TA a certain amount of time at all because of the high need (not sure if it is, maybe this hasn't been removed, just to emphasize that this is despite a need for TAs).
Completing a PhD typically takes 5-7 years in the US. In my public university, the nominal tuition for that time would be $100-150k for in-state students and $180-250k for others. Then add living costs on top of that. A PhD increases expected lifetime earnings over bachelor's, but not in all fields and definitely not enough to justify such spending.
That is how it works. PhD programs charge tuition. Tuition is typically reimbursed through some working arrangement, but you're welcome to pay out of pocket.
Because a PhD should be thought of a job, not pure education. PhD students are already underpaid, go over a lot of stress, and now some wants them to pay for these? Doesn’t add up at all.
Typically, universities have a pretty hard and clear line between research funds and teaching funds. Teaching funds come from tuition, are under the purview of someone like a provost, and are distributed to the colleges. The colleges then pay tenure track/tenured faculty, associate faculty (teaching), and TAs with these funds. Typically, these TAs get a waiver for their studies -that also comes out of teaching funds.
Research funds come from granting agencies such as NIH, NSF, DoD, DoE, and to a much lesser degree, private partnerships. These funds go directly to the tenure track, or occasionally research-only faculty to pay for their research program. These funds can also be used for RAs (pay graduate students full time so they don't need to teach). TA and RA wages are usually the same, but graduate students working as a TA won't get as much done.
Usually a position such as Vice President of Research exists. That office takes IDCs (15-80% depending on the university negotiation with the granting agency). Both IDC funds (often called F&A funds) and teaching funds pay money to the colleges for some percentage of things like building costs, staff (janitors, safety folks, admin) etc. There are usually intense negotiations between the office of the provost, and office of research, over exactly who must contribute which funds.
Oftentimes, a successful and wise research office will realize that the more graduate students they have doing unencumbered research, the more federal grants they can bring in. So many research offices will sponsor RAs per department/college out of F&A funds. Additionally, they will often pay the tuition waiver to the graduate school out of F&A funds. This can lead to not enough TAs to teach classes though, so again, this is usually negotiated between the teaching and research sides.
Typically, teaching brings in most of the money at a university (outside of the biggest research universities), but teaching revenue is much more stable, so those funds are spoken for immediately, usually on fixed costs and union jobs.
Research funds are lower, and because they are brevet quite guaranteed, many folks that are paid from research funds are on contracts that must be renewed every fiscal year, etc.
It's a different budgetary item. Unlike a household budget where people are given a general income and then asked to decide to spend it on housing, gas, groceries, etc. It's far more like SNAP, where the money given to you is legally bound to very specific things-- you can buy baby food but not diapers for your baby.
I'm certain that has cuts continue, admin will begin to be laid off, but it makes total sense that the first response to grants being rolled back is that the things that are directly funded by grants (NOT ADMIN) are also rolled back.
To continue a SNAP example: it makes total sense that when you have less food money, you buy less food. You may proceed to sell your used video game consoles later but the very first thing you do is reduce your spending on food.
At most public universities, the tenure track faculty, staff, and admin are primarily jobs negotiated through the public union. They are paid for by tuition revenue and state funding. They cannot legally be cut, and almost always are directly related to the teaching aspect of a university.
However, universities do research, and need research infrastructure. This includes administrators, safety people, compliance people, core research facilities, etc. Those are usually on what is called "soft money" - funds from IDCs. Those folks can be eliminated, of course, but there are typically very few of them and they are serving the most essential roles. If you eliminate them, you may need to eliminate your research program altogether. The NIH requires you to meet safety standards, the EPA requires specific waste disposal, etc. The folks that ensure that compliance generally are paid for by IDC funding.
It's even more specific than that. Grants are often specific to a research project and you're not supposed to pay, say, a postdoc that works on X with a grant that's supposed to cover work on Y.
Cutting admin people might mean more paperwork for professors and researches, which can lead to less grants and funding because you can’t do science while doing paperwork. Not that easy to be efficient without losing productivity.
