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Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

Does the book describe how there's a professional managerial class that took over higher education inflating its costs, degrading its services, undermining its ideals, watering down it's standards?

Colleges need to get back to their mission and ditch the sports, drinking, non-academic facilities. Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.

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> Colleges need to get back to their mission and ditch the sports, drinking, non-academic facilities. Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.

Can you explain how cutting research funding achieve these goal? Especially since many of the schools most impacted by these cuts are very much not party or college sports schools.

Those most impacted are R1 schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_...

Cutting administration achieves these goals. (It's not the skyrocketing number of tenured professors that is driving college costs.)

Now, do you have to cut research in order to cut administration? Research takes a lot of administration, but that should be paid for by the research, not by the students.

It seems like capping indirect rates achieves the goal of defunding administrative bloat while preserving funding to the actual research?

No. Indirect costs on grants aren't some slush fund used to fund whatever but are real costs involved in doing science. It costs money to build lab facilities, maintain and repair lab equipment, pay salaries of support staff like IT folks and lab techs. If indirect costs get capped, more of the actual grant will have be used for these things and less science will get done.

Included in this overhead is administrative staff salaries and administration's facilities that researchers themselves have no control over. That's all spending controlled by research administrators and the institutions administrative layers that control research including decisions about who they hire for administrative roles and various aspects of strategic planning.

It’s the rotten bureaucracy (bloated administration) in academia that results in the symptoms of non academic spending. The root cause is the management that is not allocating resources to the core mission and instead focusing on administrative costs (salaries), and expensive facilities that aren’t academically necessary.

You don’t get the professional managerial class investing in world class research labs, they spend more on sports!

>> Does the book describe how there's a professional managerial class that took over higher education inflating its costs, degrading its services, undermining its ideals, watering down it's standards?

>> Colleges need to get back to their mission and ditch the sports, drinking, non-academic facilities. Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.

> Can you explain how cutting research funding achieve these goal?

It doesn't, but I think there's a real connection there. The cutting funding is a backlash, and the correct response to that is to change to achieve a more secure societal position that doesn't invite a backlash. The current cuts to research funding are the direct result of universities allowing themselves to become identified as elements of a particular political faction. But the universities have been weakened and have few allies to call on, because they're now widely perceived to be expensive rip-offs, etc.

And dare I add to your points - actually fail students when their standard of work is not good enough? There seems to be no repercussions regarding poor quality work in the current MBA/business management undergrad space (I only speak to these, as I familiar with them) with an attitude of (actively enabled by colleges) pass entitlement and grade inflation from the students.

How is cutting cancer research funding going to produce more a robust and academically rigorous MBA program?

The correlation seems to work the other way, based on MBA program rankings: https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-sc...

Drinking has been an integral part of universities for a long, long time.

No standards or research if NSF and NIST are gutted.

> Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.

That's not really what the current Trump/GOP/Desantis policy, if you could call it that, is about.

It's about weaponizing funding to exert direct government control on what is taught and how it operates. Government approved speech only.

The current admin's letter to Harvard demanded governmenr direct control over department operation, course materials and teaching staff

They pitch this to thir base as revenge on "woke", because they've primed their base, the majority of whom have never attended college, or have not stepped foot on a campus in decades, to distrust educational institutions.

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