Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid research cuts

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...

The entire academic industry is in turmoil, the uncertainty on how bad things could get is probably the worst of it as Universities are having to plan for some pretty extreme outcomes even if unlikely.

For those who are questioning the validity of a 59% (or higher for some other institutions) overhead rate, your concerns are worth hearing and a review could be necessary, but oh my please not like this. This was an overnight (likely illegal!) change made with no warning and no consultation.

If the government decided that a cap was necessary it should be phased in to allow for insitutions to adjust the operational budgets gradually rather than this shock therapy that destroys lives and WASTES research money (as labs are potentially unable to staff their ongoing projects). A phased in approach would have nearly the same long-term budget implications.

Are there too many admin staff? Likely? Is this the right way to address that? Absolutely not.

For those who are unfamiliar with how career progress works in Academia, it is so competitive that even a year or two "break" in your career likely means you are forever unable to get a job. If you're on year 12 of an academic career, attempting to get your first job after your second (probably underpaid) postdoc and suddenly there are no jobs, you can't just wait it out. You are probably just done, and out of the market forever as you will lose your connections and have a gap in your CV which in this market is enough to disqualify you.

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.

All: some of the comments in this thread are about the University of Pittsburgh, not Penn, because there were two Pennsylvanian-university-pauses-admissions-due-to-funding-cuts threads duelling on the front page and we merged the Pittsburgh one hither. Sorry to any Pittsburghers; it was purely because this thread was posted earlier.

* (It was this one: U. of Pittsburgh pauses Ph.D. admissions amid research funding uncertainty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43145483.)

Hosting a large number of top universities which conduct research attracts the best and brightest minds from around the world, many of whom stay in the US after doing their PhD, and is a significant factor in what makes the US the biggest economy in the world.

Even if you subscribe to an America First policy, tearing down university research labs (which is the knock-on effect of cuts at the NIH, NSF, etc.) is one of the worst things you could do.

Want to actually cut gov spending? Look no further than the military budget (which the GOP Congress is proposing to _increase_, not decrease).

(That being said, yes, there is waste at universities. I'm all for some reform, but this is not reform, it's destruction.)

Vanderbilt apparently iced its entire incoming biochemistry PhD headcount? My kid got a reject, and found out later that everybody else did too.

Mike Caulfield says,

> If institutions don't push back together, they will cease to exist in the form they are now. I don't know how to say this more clearly.

And my heavens yes. This is the government threatening to end funding for universities. This movie here is no where anywhere near enough. This is an attempt to end the entire higher education system.

Does it need help & reform? Yes. But simply destroying education outright serves no good. This is a destruction of civilization by radical extremists. Universities need to be working together to defend against this mortal threat to the existence of higher education.

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

Not disagreeing there's bloat and inefficiencies at many US research universities, but something I think is missed in a lot of these discussions is that a lot of research funding works on a reimbursement basis: for relatively small things like travel, we (faculty, students) would spend first, then get reimbursed. For bigger items the university pays and charges the grant accordingly (after due diligence). None of this happens without armies of accountants; these are often classed as "administrators."

I would love to have fewer vice presidents, etc., people who really are administrators / middle managers, on our campuses. But there really aren't as many of these positions as people seem to think. Articles like [0] (cited in one of the othe comments) seem to lump everyone who is not faculty or student an "administrator." Most such people are really staff; on the research side they help with accounting, compliance, etc. (On the student-facing side there's also a lot of staff -- students & families expect a lot more from universities now, everything from housing to fancy gyms to on-campus healthcare, and more. All that needs staff to run.) To confuse things more, some faculty (say at med schools) don't teach all that much, and some "administrators" do pitch in and teach from time to time.

Again, I don't disagree we can do better, but I also think any discussion of higher ed costs and inefficiencies really should start with the reality of what universities do.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/admini...

> 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.

59% indirect research costs for administrative overhead seems high. Could it be that these charges against grants are used to fund students in other subject areas where grants are not available?

According to Wikipedia, Penn has an endowment of over $22 billion.

Not enough in the piggy bank to cover?

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.

This is nothing more than Administrators administering to protect their influence and cushy jobs. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/bureaucrat...

It's a tough situation. I agree administrative bloat is a real problem in universities, but cutting indirect cost recovery so drastically seems like a really blunt instrument. It's going to disproportionately hurt research programs, and freezing admissions is a pretty drastic first step. Hopefully the temporary pause gives them some breathing room to figure things out.

If only Penn had the richest and most powerful men in the world as alumni

I know in my state school, none of the labs expect to be able to take any student, period, at least for now. Some labs have even told students they might need to find a new lab to finish their degree, which I don't know how that works. Right now, the uncertainty is playing a major role. Advisors don't know if their money will evaporate/not be renewed, and are highly doubtful that new grants will roll in. The people running federal labs are saying basically that the expectation is to run a tight ship and do the research that is necessary, but not to expect being able to run wide-ranging projects as they have, that everyone needs to reduce their size and wind down what they're doing to only what is necessary.

I certainly don't think shutting down American research and having a country where there are no new graduate students is a really sane scenario. I think some research is definitely inexplicable when it comes to being taxpayer-funded, and some labs are bloated and can run a tighter ship. But everyone is basically paying the price because of a small minority of labs who are operating as though they aren't receiving taxpayer money, and are conducting research that is truly pointless. Of course those labs exist, but they are a small group of labs... Clearly no one wants to spend the time to look at all the grants and projects individually to find the bloat. The strange part is that doing this sort of mass-culling actually just invigorates many to double-down on what they are doing if it is somewhat politically unsavory right now. So it really isn't achieving much other than recruiting an opposition to republican power, which is probably worth more to prevent than the money that could be saved.

I think it's realistic to assume that the federal government is going to just wholesale cut a lot of the science funding, because compared to other nations, America actually funds a whole lot of science, and from what I can tell, that's much less true in other countries. The effects of that might be a bit abstracted from this event, these cuts might just result in less scientific innovation, which could cost billions of dollars added up over time easily. But, if this is just a sort of shock-and-awe thing, and then money starts becoming available again and the result is that "DEI" practices are expunged from criteria, then maybe the takeaway is just that labs just act with a lot more caution. From what I see, most labs already operate under large amounts of caution because the grant system is tricky enough.

I have zero sympathy for universities that work grad students to the bone, pay them a mere $25k stipend, and take >50% grant money for “overhead”.

The academia model is deeply, profoundly broken.

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.

It’s worth noting that Pitt’s indirect rates are normal for universities and this is how the system functions.

To the extent that MAGA can be said to have a point, I think this is it. Deep underneath the arrogance and scapegoating, they’re calling bullshit on institutions that have become self-licking ice cream cones.

I think there’s some truth to that criticism. I would prefer to see the institutions reformed democratically than destroyed by fiat. I contend that sacrificing rule of law is deeply counterproductive. But the core complaint that things aren’t working? There’s some truth to it.

At Yale

> Yale University employs nearly one administrator per undergrad [1]

If Penn suffers from this same bloat, maybe they should be cutting adminstrators. I see no mention of such cuts in this article.

[1] https://www.thecollegefix.com/yale-university-employs-nearly...

This blog post gives some good context on why indirect rates exist and some more reasonable ideas for reforming the current system: https://goodscience.substack.com/p/indirect-costs-at-nih?utm...

Ph.D. programs being stopped: https://www.wesa.fm/health-science-tech/2025-02-21/universit...

I just saw this on Reddit so now I am concerned as well- not sure Penn is a go to place this year. “I just heard from an insider all SAS phd students will keep getting their support cut over the next 5 years. Be careful if you accept an offer from Penn this year! Your package could be cut down as you move forward. I didn't want to believe it but who would have thought a school with this size endowment would face an epic collapse in Arts and Sciences. Im going w my second choice to be safe! Good luck everyone!” Anyone else hear this?

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.

Most departments at the moment are choosing to be conservative with their funds. No one really knows how their capacity, whether through grants or through teaching, is going to change. As far as I know, many universities are also pausing hiring for full-time employees (which is probably wise, at least until the dust settles). Really tough time to be looking for an academic appointment...

I'm grateful that I have enough funds to guarantee two more years here as a postdoc, but if things don't settle for the better there might not be a spot here anymore.

U Pitt's endowment is 5.7 Billion! The funding cuts are big but it's only ~2% of the endowment, why are they pausing PHD admittance rather than using the resources they have readily available?

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.

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...

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.

It’s ok. China is going to be doing all the research from now on. The US empire has fallen, like the British or Roman empires before it.

Time for these universities to pick up the tab and run a sustainable business that isn’t dependent on government handouts. If their research is high quality and valuable, it will survive.

The current state of academia paper mills, unreproducible research and rampant fraud are a direct result of the spigot of money and lack of accountability.

The experiment that the US is running is unprecedented.

What if we screw all our allies, make them scared for their safety so that they start building their own weapons, dismantle completely the government apparatus by assigning clowns to lead it, gut the income by incapacitating IRS and bringing down all the institutions we built as a nation (universities, congress, courts etc).

I am trying to avoid conspiracies, but how would an enemy from within would look like, if not like this? The only thing not done yet is to point our own ICBMs at us.

Rich will get education anyways. Less fortunate will be squeezed out of opportunities. Nice.

22.3 billion endowment. Maybe they can fund a little research without taxpayers?

Half the nation is already functionally braindead, now we're defunding the other half? Good thing there isn't some giant nation with bottomless pockets ready to overtake us at the first opportunity.

Pitt has an endowment of 5.5 BILLION dollars [1].

It really does not seem like they paused all PhD admissions as an honest way to optimize their money. It seems like they are using their institutional power to protest Trump's policies, to create a sad state of academic research so that Trump is blamed for it until he reverts his policies.

I feel sad for the rejected PhD students that were caught in the crossfire of Pitt's protest.

[1] https://www.utimes.pitt.edu/news/pitt-s-endowment-2022-23

amazing how many Americans can applaud this reduction when it is completely illegal. America works because of checks and balances and oversight. Obviously there are problems and grift.

But to think that everyone is okay that solving it means Elon and a hand picked group of 25 year olds can just slash budgets and see top secret documents when none of them would pass a drug test or screen means we are know looking at the fall of the American system

The government's decision to cap the overhead rate for university grants requires _more_ administrational burden rather than less, so the only thing to cut are the actual researchers.

Another example of the stupidity of Trump/Musk's actions.

Federal workers should just quit en masse to teach these guys a lesson. And make them hire back for 2x the salary.

Defend the cathedral!

Without the production of knowledge, it will soon prove impossible to levy objective evidence against the despicable lies of the Trump administration.

Though it might look like the effect of new gov, actually all this is just the wave of AI and excess technologies poisoning the very birth places of those technologies and science. The effect takes many forms and appears to be associated with other cause, but overall trend is clear. Humans don't need places of learning any more. Universities are heading into their ruins.