2025 Hiring Pause

Here is a 2024 article from the Stanford Daily: https://stanforddaily.com/2024/03/13/behind-stanfords-double...

In 1996: 13,811 students, 1488 faculty, 5881 total staff.

In 2024: 17,529 students, 2323 faculty, 16,527 total staff.

In 28 years: 27% increase in students 56% increase in faculty 281% increase in total staff

The ratio of staff to students is nearly 1:1

This is insane.

Cornell has an endowment of 10.7 billion dollars. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024/10/university-endowmen...

Other institutions are also following the lead: MIT [0], Stanford [1], North Carolina State [2], UCSD [3], and perhaps there will be many others.

[0]: https://hr.mit.edu/jobs

[1]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/02/staff-hiring

[2]: https://www.wral.com/news/education/nc-state-hiring-freeze-f...

[3]: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/02/20/uc-san-diego...

Not going to lie, I felt the 2025 market would get worse but never thought to have "(potential) mass government layoff" on my bingo card.

What are unemployed people even finding these days? Is everyone just giving in to the gig economy? Sadly my car is definitely on its last legs (probably saved by the pandemic) so I don't know how long it'd last if I did Doordash/Uber

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On topic, it's a shame even an Ivy League is feeling a result of this economy and administration. What does that say about any other public school? Is post-secondary education going to collapse?

Same at Stanford https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/02/staff-hiring

How are the ivy leagues NOT financially independent? People claw/cheat/do whatever it takes to get in. Ivy's employ some of the best raw IQ people we have. Endowment funds over years should blossom.

Could they be so smart to 'redline', to maximally extract as much funds from the Gov as possible while also pumping up their investments? Or might they not have managed funds well enough and truly cannot afford things?

if scenario 1) refactor expenses, pass an audit, and make a plan to build up funds. return to 75% prior budget levels

if scenario 2) refactor expenses, pass an audit, and make a plan to build up funds. return to 25% prior budget levels

*in both cases we need to remove regulations on schools so they can fire all the admin (they claim to need to keep up legally inane wild things) and pay the professors/researchers more.

Colleges and Universities are already on a downward trend; the perfect storm of declining enrollment/population numbers and AI potentially wiping out what they offer. Colleges and University were meant to be a special protected Eunuch class studying 'the dark arts', but they've publicly become known havens of scheming Eunuchs trying to overthrow the emperor. Too close to the sun

If anything in any country should be free, it should be education. And, obviously, the administration of education should never be a for-profit venture.

Valuing democracy and being able to select sensible leaders depends on it.

While I understand that people have their problems with universities tuition and loans ..etc. The problem is here is that funding for basic and applied science on all front is being cut. It does provide a lot of jobs and supports a lot of universities operations too. Universities build labs which does provide infrastructure (buildings and other facilities) and NSF, NIH and DOE provide funds to use these facilities to pursue research. So these agencies have dependency on universities to provide these research facilities and manage hiring and compliance with rules.

Now there are many problems with current system which need to be addressed. But you don't solve the cancer in the cells by killing cells and thus killing patient. But you use targeted approach to the problem. This needs some modifications to the rules and deep changes in laws that will require further study and discussion. This is of course not going to happen currently.

Now some people argue that the budget is a problem and debt and deficit is more important. But again lets talk data. The whole NSF and NIH budget is less than $60B dollars in 2024 which amounts to a little bit less than 1% of the total budget. If you compare it with other Items in the budget percentage wise you will get (DoD - 7.5%), (Medicare - 6.7%), (Social Security - 4.6%), (Medicaid - 10%),(National Debt Interest - 15%). So even cutting it all will not achieve any significant improvement while create a lot of problems. There are a significant part of economy and jobs are supported by these money. The return on investment is positive in most cases and you are leading in innovation and most of scientific frontier. One can argue that these two items are very cheap to maintain you dominance than another couple of air craft carriers (and their operation costs).

If you tried and achieved any reduction in the big items in the federal budget you will be saving something near the total budget of NIH and NSF. But again for some reason a lot of focus on these programs while less focus on big items for some reason.

For context on the Cornell numbers with breakdowns on revenue and expenditure, here's Cornell's page on:

Operating Budget: Sources and Uses: https://finance.cornell.edu/financial-guide/operating-budget...

Operating Capital Budget Plan (PDF): https://dbp.cornell.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/FY-2024-O...

Consolidated Financial Statement: (PDF): https://finance.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/cornell-fina...

From pg 45 of CFS, compensation and benefits is definitely Cornell's largest category. Instruction and Healthcare services making up about $1.3B each.

Instruction, student services and academic support: $1,336,694 Research: $481,268 Public service: $108,197 Healthcare services: $1,339,074 Institutional support: $539,278 Enterprises and subsidiaries: $146,630

Total Compensation and benefits: $3,951,141

My working theory is that wage growth was getting to be too much for the corporations so flooding the market with candidates is meant to counteract that.

> due to "significant financial uncertainty" in higher education,

This is directly linked to the new Trump administration's policies. The university explicitly cites potential deep cuts to federal research funding, new tax legislation affecting endowment income, and ongoing concerns about rapid growth and escalating costs as primary reasons for this decision.

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. The university's four-month hiring freeze coincides with similar measures at other prestigious institutions like Stanford, MIT, and Northwestern, all responding to the broader context of the Trump administration's proposals to eliminate the Department of Education and Executive Orders reducing scientific research funding.

This new US government is deeply hurting itself and destroying most valuable assets. Which it needs to compete against China or Europe.

> To ensure that we continue to thrive in an even more complex future, we must commit, across every part of our institution, to a sustainable budget today.

Are they implicitly admitting they have been living on an unsustainable budget so far?

Seeing other comments bringing up the numbers of staff vs students+faculty would suggest that’s the case…

> The pause best positions us, due to the increased level of review, to carefully and with due restraint, advance only those positions that are determined to be essential at this time.

What twisted mind concocted this sentence?

Not mentioned -- Cornell has an $11bn endowment that can be tapped to make up some of the shortfall. Any issues with Federal funding will be hurting smaller schools and schools with smaller endowments way before hurting Cornell.

I worry that every penny saved will fuel an unnecessary war

Can't speak in regard to Cornell, 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. It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums.

My university jacked tuition 24% in one year; and when asked why, they essentially said "because everyone else did."

For this and other offensive behavior, I instructed them to never again ask me for a penny; and they haven't.

10.7B endowment. Clearly can't make it without federal funds.

What does Cornell's 10 billion dollar endowment pay for?

From the article

> Together with all of American higher education, Cornell is entering a time of significant financial uncertainty

From Wikipedia

>As of 2024, Cornell University has an endowment of $10.7 billion

I’m so tired of this corporate jargon infecting academia. Universities used to value clarity, now they sound like HR memos. It’s the same playbook: bloat admin, cut actual workers, rebrand inefficiency as strategy.

I was on the faculty at several schools, private, top 10, public, top 20, etc. Staff categorically does not include graduate students and post-docs, or teaching faculty. The staff expansion problem is the main problem facing academia. There is staff for handling day-to-day functioning of a department, they are usually over-worked and under-payed. This has not expanded and is not a problem.

The main problem is staff at the dean and above level. They are nebulous and their job functions rather diffuse. My impression is that appointments in those functions are with some frequency obtained through nepotism. Furthermore the staff in those functions is often highly ideological. Their true main function seems to bully faculty so that we are constantly "put in our place". The point is to shred to pieces the old principles of shared governance. Essentially they want to make us _their_ employees. If you don't believe me, I can expand on the various interactions that I had with such staff. An extreme example of this is the expansion of staff at UC's into faculty hiring, they now pre-sift all applications for ideological compliance first and then pass on the pre-sifted packet to the faculty.

Here is the staff that I am aware of and that I had the pleasure to interact with: Staff that handles disability accommodations (a large percentage of students are now officially "disabled" and use this disability to gain advantages when taking exams) , staff that is assigned to each student to handle their academic problems or advise them on which course to take (unnecessary they can just talk to faculty), staff that is in charge of Title IX (they don't do much and those departments employ pricey lawyers), staff that handles your grant submissions (their only useful function is making the difficult budget computations for the draconian shares that the university takes for itself, they also sometimes pester faculty about irrelevant things and refuse to submit the grant unless you satisfy them). 99% of the work of that staff is busy work and could be easily cut. I am sure their salaries are all in the 100+K categories. I 'd venture to say that if they are cut faculty would be made more efficient. I have also met staff that is in charge of basically nothing, they attend an enormous amount of committees and pushes for some "change" that never materializes. It is understood these days among the faculty that anybody who wants a real salary increase (but doesn't have the chops to get an external offer) needs to become part of that staff, usually in the form of some deanlet handling some obtuse issue. You probably see the problem.

In the meantime faculty is still performing all the critical functions: we serve on admission committees for graduate students, we serve on post-doc committees, we do the faculty interviews, we do the research, we teach the classes, but our salary increases are barely matched with inflation, essentially regardless of individual performance.

By the way, there is no justification for a hiring freeze in this environment where no real hardship has materialized yet. It is also theater since most hiring has concluded by now. It will be used as a justification to give me no increase this year, I am sure, while the endowment will grow. All of course will be blamed on the bad orange man in the white house.