2025 Hiring Pause
hr.cornell.edu
hr.cornell.edu
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.
Obviously this varies from university to university and I know nothing about Cornell.
They are considered staff.
> "This is insane."
"This expansion is largely at the School of Medicine, where the yearly staff growth rate of 5.6% is significantly higher than the 1.7% rate across the rest of the University...
School of Medicine spokesperson Courtney Lodato wrote that the increase largely includes clinical educators who teach and provide clinical care, financed by external research funds from government and industry sources"
A little over a decade ago, I remember Dean of a top medical school I attended showing the budget of the medical school. Tuition was like 5% or of the entire med school revenue and budget. I remember raising my hand and asking the Dean if tuition was so little, why not just make it free. He gave me a death stare and just danced around the question.
You could have 10,000 employees, however 4,000 of them are physicians/providers, 3,000 of whom work less than full time for that entity. So you are looking at 10,000 employees, but some number between 7,000 and 9,999 FTEEs. These are very different, and very relevant, numbers when looking at healthcare organizations.
"Methodology & Definitions Staff Headcount Staff headcounts include all regular, benefits-eligible university employees. With rare exceptions, employees must be appointed at 50% FTE (full-time equivalent) or more for at least six consecutive months in order to be eligible for benefits. The Professoriate and employees of SLAC are not included. Employees with multiple jobs are counted only in the job that is tied to their benefits, typically the one with the largest number of standard hours."
MIT Staff to student ratio: 1.47
No medical school.
The 17,490 number includes 4,500 Lincoln Lab staff. Backing those out. We get 12,990 MIT Staff.
So an MIT Staff to student ratio of: 1.09
https://facts.mit.edu/employees/ https://facts.mit.edu/lincoln-laboratory/
[0] source: me
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-2/subtitle-A/chapter-II/p...
Many people pursue academic careers solely for a comfortable lifestyle, doing minimal or even no research for long period of time. With extra lack of oversight that allows researchers to isolate themselves they create circles which cover each other.
Occasionally, folks outside of the circle come in and they start finding ton of fraud in the research with multiple big cases in past few years on top universities like Harvard for example.
do you have any concrete evidence (that is not based on vibes, anecdotes, or "everyone knows") to support this claim?
I want what you're smoking because that might be one of the biggest fabrications I've heard in a long time.
A family member works for an eatery at a large university. Technically they are employees (staff) of the university, but pretty much in name only. They work for a business unit which receives no financial support from the university. They are profitable on their own and if they aren’t, they would close down. They are provided benefits via the university, but it is part of their budget. Including them in the count relative to students is about as useful as including the employees of the (independent) Starbucks on campus.
(It’s not Stanford, so I can’t speak to that specific institution)
This is the inevitable conclusion of unprecedented concentration of capital, which is not new but only being revealed during a time of seemingly limitless automation potential.
Do staff include productive researchers producing net positive incoming?
Other comments mention the medical school. Are these staff providing patient care (and billing insurance)?
University staff aren’t necessarily just your traditional educators. A whole lot of productive stuff (both for the university and everyone else) can potentially benefit from “staff.”
Nit: 181% increase
I do wonder what percentage of said "staff" are really just students working to fulfill student responsibility[1] for pennies on the dollar.
[1] https://financialaid.stanford.edu/undergrad/how/student.html
> Stanford also has unique characteristics that create high staff headcount, former Provost Persis Drell told the Faculty Senate during a May 2023 meeting: Unlike other institutions, Stanford requires more staff to maintain Stanford Research Park, a large housing portfolio and other facilities.
from one of the sources [0] that paragraph linked to:
> It’s also important to understand how Stanford defines terms used in headcount growth since those definitions vary widely among research universities, Drell noted. For example, clinician educators, which have grown significantly in number, are categorized as “staff” at Stanford, while at other universities they are often counted as “faculty.” In addition, and in contrast to many other institutions, Stanford has chosen to focus more on hiring staff in many areas rather than using outside contractors whose employees would not count as Stanford staff.
and from [1] also linked in the above paragraph:
> We recognize that stable, affordable housing is critical for student success. Stanford guarantees housing for undergraduates for all four years and provides housing for over 70% of graduate students. We also provide as much as three times more student housing than large universities across California in similarly constrained housing markets.
given the context, it seems perfectly reasonable that Stanford would have more "staff" employees than the University of Southwestern North Dakota, even normalized for different numbers of student enrollment.
0: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2023/05/provost-provides-d...
Aren't all the big bad billionaires self-made autodidacts?
Most people aren't. Most people benefit from education. If there are unlimited AGI educators, that seems like an extraordinary claim and I haven't even seen a pilot. Is the plan to move fast and break education? Cause that seems kind of extreme rather than any sort of conservative I've ever known.
Do you just want to destroy those posh academic institutions? Or are the billionaires offering to subsidize education with donations by increasing taxes on themselves?
Or you don't realize that "faculty" can include researchers?
I'm confused. Can you clarify?
I went to a smaller school in my city, but at the time most everyone I know who applied got it. I would not get it today, and people end up wait listed, etc... IMO, that is the failing of the US higher education system. Next is cost to the student.
A more useful comparison would divide staff into "supported by tuition" (should be related to student count) and "supported by external grants and clinical income".
This idea that costs have increased because of administrative staff expansion is a popular one, but one that ignores what R1 universities spend money on, and where that money comes from. (Ironically, I suspect that the university may be spending more money on research, because of limits on indirect costs.)
Every University’s purported mission is to educate students and advance our collective knowledge together with its students.
That’s it.
If the university makes more money from treating patients than teaching its students, then its mission can’t help but shift.
Likewise if the bulk of the staff are not focused on teaching and educating, then its mission can’t help but shift.
This is a problem.
> That’s it.
Not if the university has a medical school. Virtually all R1 universities with medical schools have a hospital, and a large clinical practice. Most of medical school is an apprenticeship where you treat patients. Medical schools need patients, which means a lot of additional staff.
Likewise, in most fields it is no longer possible to advance knowledge just by going to the library or writing on a white board. Knowledge is advanced through experimentation, and experimental equipment and reagents cost money, and need staff to use and maintain them.
No university (and certainly no medical school), makes enough money in tuition and fees to pay for the education provided, and I seriously doubt that many universities have supported themselves solely through tuition since the beginning of the universities in the middle ages.
You are certainly correct that university deans and presidents have seen their mission shift with the increasing cost of education, and indeed faculty are writing many more grants than they did 75 years ago. So time commitments have shifted. But there is an implication that it could have been some other way -- that the money is there (or could have been there) if some other path were chosen. It is hard for me to imagine where the money might have come from.
It’s not a problem. You just have a narrow view of what you think our higher ed institutions should be.
If higher learning isn’t the core mission, then there are better ways to advance knowledge and improve the lives of people and the environment.
Per https://jsri.msu.edu/publications/nexo/vol-xxii/no-1-fall-20...
> This has had several consequences for the governance of universities: 1) the role of shared governance has receded in importance in the day-to-day governance of universities; 2) the balance of power and authority has shifted toward administrators; and 3) faculty have been subjected to a series of performance measures that disproportionately values productivity over shared governance participation.
Publish-or-perish and shoddy research is a direct result of this shift in the mission, as measurements became all but expected.
By the time I entered uni the 1990s, things were shifting negatively in higher institutions.
I don't believe point #1 - I have been involved in shared governance bodies as a student and staff, and at least where I've spent time, these bodies are strong.
For point #2, I never saw any shift of authority to administrators. In fact, I left academia because I was given a mission to centralize computing resources to ensure we're responsible stewards of the data we held. Instead, PIs would end-run around shared computing facilities, spending their own grant money on high end workstations, USB drives. I left and went into big tech because I was tired of fighting with essentially 50-100 small fiefdoms. The administrators were powerless, and if they tried to force the PIs to submit, they PIs would simply go someplace else.
For #3, while "impact factor" took on a larger role, I did not see a problematic shift in how we did science. Everyone was given adequate resources to participate in governance. If anything, the outsized influence individual PIs had over how they did their research made it more difficult to ensure data was stored safely, analyses were reproducible, and so on. That, to me, is a greater risk than the fear that administration was telling researchers what to research.
There are problems with higher ed in the US, but I don't understand how to equate a perceived shift away from "shared governance" with deep fundamental issues in the mission of our higher ed system. We need both a focus on educating young people (need to have fresh minds and bodies to keep the research machine churning) as well as basic AND cutting edge research to keep progress moving forward.
Why the resistance to the top-down approach?
Nobody resists if it means more resources; and faster procurement of resources.
Instead it seems researchers are forced to navigate politics and raise funding.
Or do you mean that each department has its own IT department and it’s resisting consolidation?
For #3: It’s not about resources but about how “impact factor” is measured, and whether it’s useful a useful metric.
Often, for example little attention is given to confirmation of a suspected dead-end. That still requires in-depth knowledge of the subject, is still research, and advances knowledge.
The resistance to the top down approach was, to me, misunderstanding the risks of storing their data outside of a safe place, and a fear of losing control of their data.
The last institute I worked at was focused on basic biomedical research - dead ends were what we chased all day!
Actually drawing down the fund would just ruin future finances.
> In particular, the endowment supports roughly two-thirds of the budget for undergraduate and graduate financial aid, as well as a significant portion of faculty salaries, research, and key programs like libraries and student services.
The “color of money” is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of university admin but explains so much about how things operate.
If you have 500M allowed to cover education and require 700M total for it, then the restriction doesn't matter at all.
This is really victim blaming. I would not have an issue if the government has said that for future grant rounds there will be limits on overheads, but this lot just decided they cut already agreed and planned budgets and no matter the consequences.
institutions and allocators operate with a very different mindset versus individuals or hedgies.
[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...
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?
I'm curious if this is because you never heard about what was in Project 2025, or didn't think Trump would win, or didn't think he would enact it?
And to be fair some smart people (in the courts) are blocking it. I just didn't think so many illegal actions in the course of a month would escalate this far without. It makes Nixon look like the Dali Lhama.
Ivies aren’t dependent on tuition at all. All have need-blind admissions and most offer full rides to anyone accepted who couldn’t pay otherwise. Penn just updated its income thresholds to provide guaranteed full tuition scholarships to families earning less than 200k a year and budgeted over $300m/year to cover it. These aren’t the box-top Us you’re looking for.
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
I think the ivies will be fine. It's 99% of other universities without 10b in endowments I'm worried about.
I cannot speak about Cornell specifically, I do not know if they have a bloated administration or superfluous expenses. But the truth is that admin stuff are necessary for supporting education and research. Having been in universities during admin reforms reducing admin stuff (claiming that they make "smart restructuring") it always negatively affects work done in the university in one way or another. Usually, it means that research staff will have to pick up some of the admin work themselves, or be offered less support doing it. As research staff are usually paid more than admin stuff, that is not necessarily effective (unless it is assumed that research stuff will be working overtime anyway). In any case, it does not seem like an efficient move most of the times, even if it seems so to the bureaucrats who make these plans.
Valuing democracy and being able to select sensible leaders depends on it.
It's called The Internet.
Also I can now get on the Internet and research jet engines or kidney transplants, but unless someone makes me learn the whole curriculum around it and then tests me to check if I understand, it's not worth much.
That's what interviews are for.
implying i need to be dependent on a school to help me retain learning is a concept that is foreign to me. if i had that kind of dependency in my learning life, i'd be unemployed.
Crassness aside.
1. the internet is getting more and more pay walls too. So proper education isn't even free on the internet without months of curation.
2. People who make this claim must not have seen studies about homseschooled kids. That social element in being around a group of peers is crucial development that you can't really simulate anywhere else (without again, a crap ton of money for camps or something). Especially these days when everything is trying to isolate off.
People who think you can learn "everything" from the Internet have a very limited view of "everything". And could probably learn about the world by going out there ;)
But sure, keep telling yourself that your overpriced "education" is worth anything in this era of truly massive information access.
Yes, I watched online video. Read books, blogs etc.
But the true learning was done as apprentice with a few experienced beekeepers.
Beekeeping is only a part theory. There's a big part of practice. From training precise and calm hand movements to how to properly tucking in your vest to listening, feeling, and reading bees mood.
My point isn't that education should be expensive (my beekeeping journey cost me less than a few hundred Euro). But that education is far more than just putting theory in a brain.
Other examples are sports, art, crafts, cooking, music, acting, dancing, maintenance, building, gardening etc. lots of stuff that you can start in through YouTube. But that, in the end, requires fysical training, experience, and therefore at least guidance from experienced humans.
As for degrees with no use, pretty sure these are the byproducts of education for profit, with heavy marketing passing as administrative expense.
Maybe you could divide the system in two halves: 1) Of national interest, 2) Discretionary.
As for earning potential, it has nothing to do with free education, as so many high-earners in the US were educated by such systems.
I can't tell you're being serious or you're being hyperbolic for the sake of defending education. Most people, given the choice would rather get free food, water, or healthcare.
Material benefits or wealth can be stolen away on the whim of the stronger party, as history has proven over and over again.
No one can steal my education however.
—-
[1] This is a thing both the strong and weaker groups understood very well for over 3000 years. Who could learn which skills and therefore do what job is what the caste system was all about .
Teachers were and are considered only step below God, your teachers commands supersede even those of parents . Stories like those of ekalavya are venerated for a reason.
The power of knowledge and education was well understood and also closely guarded to create and manage oppression for thousands of years
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.
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
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.
This is less than 0.75% of Cornell's endowment, so I'm not sure there is a strong case for causation here.
An endowment is a collection of funds that have been donated. Generally each donation is for furtherance of some specific aim that the donor wanted to promote.
Usually the terms of the donation are that the money should be managed to support the purpose for which it was donated in perpetuity. To implement that the managers of the endowment invest the money for long term growth, and use the earnings to go toward the purpose of the donation.
Cornell currently spends each year around 5% from their endowment, as do most other top schools.
Endowments are usually not used to make up unexpected shortfalls for at least 2 reasons:
1. They are already spending all they can consistent with supporting the various causes the donors donated in perpetuity.
2. Because the endowment is a collection of individual donations that were donated for different purposes there might not actually be anything in the endowment that can be used towards a particular shortfall.
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…
What twisted mind concocted this sentence?
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.
As other people have mentioned in this thread, the point of endowments is to provide a steady source of income for the university's activities, not a piggy bank you can raid.
>It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums.
I'm sure the right is equally mad about universities "blowing money" on humanities programs as well. Should we get rid of those as well?
Not sure what you're on about with "the right" and "humanities programs." Do "humanities programs" bring in loads of cash?
But you specifically advocated for stripping a university's non-profit status, partly on the basis of having an endowment. Therefore it's pretty reasonable to extrapolate that you don't like the concept of endowments, even if you're not explicitly advocating for depleting them.
>Not sure what you're on about with "the right" and "humanities programs."
The point is that the right like sport programs, but the left thinks they're boondoggles, and the left like humanities programs but the right thinks they're boondoggles. Getting rid of sports programs is a good way to piss off the right, and for them to defund humanities programs next time they're in power.
>Do "humanities programs" bring in loads of cash?
You'd rather than universities stop doing things that generate cash for their educational mission?
So now, should the University instead reallocate funds like that, thus (perhaps) losing top faculty, to (marginally) lower tuition?
Similarly, imagine a university raises millions of dollars for scholarships. Once again, they use the proceeds to fund the scholarships. Should they instead use the principal (as you're kind of suggesting), thus eventually running out of funds, or should they keep the endowment, and thus keep giving out scholarships?
Before condemning endowments, it would be better to first understand how they're being used. For example, if you found out that some large fraction was for student scholarships, would that change your position?
(to be clear, I'm not particularly on one side or the other here; I just think more nuanced positions are needed...)
And I still won't excuse raising tuitions sky-high "just because." And while I don't know the economics of athletic programs, screwing students while building three stadiums in a couple of decades isn't a good look.
As has been mentioned elsewhere, sitting on endowments is what you're supposed to do—you don't burn through the principal, you spend the interest. The point of an endowment is to provide a sustainable baseline income to keep the school going forever, it's not like an investment round where you're expected to use up the runway in an effort to reach profitability through other income streams.
> It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums.
Depending on which sports you're talking about and which schools, this might actually be an example of an investment that is expected to yield a return. At a lot of schools the sports programs subsidize the academics, so having a nice and roomy football stadium is actually a pretty sound investment into income streams that benefit everyone, even students with no interest in football.
https://dbp.cornell.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/FY25-Oper...
> 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
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.