Hiring freeze in academia

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So, the University of California, *not* all of academia.

Stanford University, MIT, Northwestern University, Cornell University, University of Notre Dame, Emory University, University of Washington, and North Carolina State University are among other institutions that have announced either full or partial hiring freezes. You should expect more to follow suit.

Anyone who knows anything about academe knows that this has been going on since the pandemic when enrollment continued its trend of falling off the cliff. A college education has become too expensive and the cost benefit analysis is not always in the favor of throwing yourself into debt for 10 years.

The science community disagrees with you.

Currents cuts to research at eu precedented. The withholding of allocated USAID money/ NIH/ CDC and Dept Energy funding have caused many planned health and STEM research projects to be cancelled or paused.

DC is post doc at leading STEM academic research center and all the post docs are worried about finding work now.

Also enrollment has not been dropping off at top colleges but they are impacted by the research cuts as well.

Scientific Research is Getting Cut—and That Should Scare All Americans
The Trump administration’s cuts to federally funded STEM research is devastating current and future innovations by NEA Higher Ed members.
https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/scientific-research-getting-cut-and-should-scare-all-americans

US science is under threat ― now scientists are fighting back
Researchers are organizing protests and making their voices heard as Trump officials slash funding and lay off federal scientists.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00661-8


NIH Budget Cuts Are a “Short-Sighted” Setback for US Science
An NIH policy to reduce funding for indirect costs to 15 percent, although temporarily blocked nationwide, sparks widespread concern and criticism among scientists.
https://www.the-scientist.com/nih-budget-cuts-are-a-short-sighted-setback-for-us-science-72707

Space scientists fearful as Trump administration targets science and mulls NASA cuts
Researchers worry an “extinction-level event” is coming for space science as the Trump administration looks to slash spending.
https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/space-scientists-fearful-as-trump-administration-targets-science-and-mulls-nasa-cuts/

These frustrated scientists want to leave the United States — do you? Take Nature’s poll
In the wake of the Trump administration’s funding freezes and job cuts, some researchers are planning their next move.

Some scientists in the United States have told Nature that they are considering leaving the country in the wake of widespread disruption to research brought in by the administration of US President Donald Trump. The researchers say they are looking for opportunities in Europe, Australia and Asia.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00757-1

France has said they would welcome US scientists and researchers-this came after a French researcher was denied access into the country (he was coming to a conference in TX) because he texted with colleagues criticism of Trump policies. Everyone should be alarmed when reading this story.

The Netherlands has also started a fund to attract scientists and researchers fleeing the US. Republican funding cuts to science and research will invariably lead to a massive brain drain over the next four years. We are squandering so many advantages because of the morons in power. It's so easy to destroy things. But it takes decades to build all the infrastructure that goes into science and research. It's very clear that Republicans are pursuing the Russia model for the US. All the talent will end up in Canada and Europe to escape the enshittification of America.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So, the University of California, *not* all of academia.

Stanford University, MIT, Northwestern University, Cornell University, University of Notre Dame, Emory University, University of Washington, and North Carolina State University are among other institutions that have announced either full or partial hiring freezes. You should expect more to follow suit.

Anyone who knows anything about academe knows that this has been going on since the pandemic when enrollment continued its trend of falling off the cliff. A college education has become too expensive and the cost benefit analysis is not always in the favor of throwing yourself into debt for 10 years.

The "folk wisdom" on this is total bullshit. Even accounting for the huge differences between the average student who goes to college and one who does not, there is very good evidence from very good administrative data that going to college causes one's earnings to go up, even for the most marginal students.

See, e.g., https://www.nber.org/papers/w32296

Also notice in that paper that it's not just the individual rate of return to college students that is large. The "social" rate of return is large too. That's another way of saying that when people spread this folk wisdom to discourage people from going to college, they are making the world worse off, full stop.

Does that account that marginally admitted students are likely more well off to begin with. You know like the Varsity Blues sting where rich kids were cheating to get in. I was the opposite I was an exceptional student with a free ride(with fafsa), but very little return on the college degree. It took me nearly ten years to get a job in the field and am still making median wages for my area.

Higher education is nothing but a social sorting system.

Actually, yes, the study does deal with this pretty effectively, although the potential issue is kind of the opposite of what you're implying.

The study is using the various SAT/ACT cutoffs at public schools in Texas, only comparing people who are within a few test score points of the cutoff. These cutoffs have a big impact on admissions probability, but they are imperfect, because some students get in anyway (Figure 2). The students just above and below the cutoff look almost identical across all all the observable characteristics in the data (Figures 3 and 4), so there isn't an obvious bump that would exist if, for example, wealthier families were cheating on the SATs to get above the cutoff.

But, since the cutoffs aren't 100% binding, there is still a concern that wealthier families might be finding other ways to get in despite being below the SAT/ACT cutoffs. The standard econ toolkit in this case adjusts for this by statistically identifying "compliers", i.e. people who only go if they exceed the cutoff, because they don't find another way in. Comparing columns 4 and 5 of table 1, you can see that although the compliers are pretty similar to the other marginal applicants, there is some suggestive evidence that they may be a bit more economically disadvantaged. For example, compliers are more likely to be black and a bit less likely to be male.

But, the key thing is, the estimated effects of scoring above the threshold are for these compliers. In other words, this study measures the impact precisely on a subset of students that are not able to otherwise game the system, to use your words. More importantly, if the study is doing a bad job of this statistical adjustment (I don't think it is), then the estimated impact of going to college would likely be underestimated, not overestimated as you're suggesting. This is because SAT/ACT scores have a weaker relationship to eventual college attendance among wealthier people, so you'd be capturing some of the earnings effects of going to college in both sides of the cutoff

tl;dr yes the research is good. You have the link. Read the paper and quit with the folk wisdom bullshitting that is harming high school graduates by talking them out of one of the best investments they can make.

Your research just isn't consistent with other "high quality" research, showing nominal or negative benefit for kids from modest backgrounds going to inexpensive schools. I would attribute the effect to being that marginally qualified that end up going to college are more likely wealthy. I'm glad your statistics bear that out somewhat.

https://freopp.org/oppblog/do-low-income-students-benefit-from-college-what-the-data-say/

A little more than folk wisdom here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I really don't see why subsidizing research needs to be done by the public.

All of the endpoints are for private industry.

A) Why do you get an education? So that you can get a job in private industry.

B) Why do we develop technology? So that private industry can make money developing it.

For point A, I can see the argument that we can make people that wouldn't otherwise have an opportunity to get the education and get the jobs, but in practice is doesn't play out like that. Private industry is so nepotistic. Very few of the people that get government aid end up in good jobs in industry. In cases there are jobs that the Good Ol' Boys for industry don't want to give their kids, they clearly prefer foreigners as indentured servants. So basically, we pay to train foreigners so that private industry can take advantage of indentured servants. The rest of us end up with giant academic bills.

This is *extremely* limited thinking and not well grounded in economics at all.

Ideas are inherently non rival (my use of an idea doesn't limit your use of an idea). But, just having a new idea isn't enough for a business to profit--they need to be able to somehow exclude other businesses from using (or fully taking advantage of) the new idea, or any potential profits will be competed away. And, if there's little chance to make a profit from an idea in the future, then the business won't do the research to develop the idea in the first place. It doesn't matter that the idea might be fantastic for society, since businesses only care about the gains that they themselves can capture.

We handle this problem, by, among other things, patent and copyright law. You get a temporary legal monopoly for a new idea to incentivize investment, and in exchange the idea is made public so the rest of the world can build upon it. But there is a big inherent tradeoff in this--monopolies are economically inefficient, and society would actually be better off if we could get the ideas without giving businesses these monopoly powers.

And, even those systems aren't enough to incentivize many kinds of research, because the research is not directed enough at a specific problem for businesses to assess how likely they are to profit, or because successfully generating the idea would undercut profits in other areas (like using existing compounds or naturally occurring substances in place of patented drugs). Or, sometimes, the immediate costs of allowing a monopoly for a couple decades are so big that we'd be better off just paying the research costs outright (e.g., HIV/AIDS medications).

Government and academic research exists to fill in these gaps. No one is suggesting that we shouldn't also have plenty of private research. But the idea that "all the endpoints are for private industry" or that private research alone could handle everything is absurd and frankly, dangerous.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So, the University of California, *not* all of academia.

Harvard, Princeton, Penn, University of Pittsburgh, University of Vermont …

All have sizeable endowments. Crack open that checkbook.

I love when people have no idea how higher eductaion works chime in.
Try learning something:https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/how-do-university-endowments-work/

Endowment funds support the teaching, research, and public service missions of colleges and universities.

Typically, endowment funds follow a fairly strict set of long-term guidelines that dictate the asset allocation that will yield the targeted return without taking on too much risk.

In the case of endowment funds for academic institutions, the income generated is intended to finance a portion of the operating or capital requirements of the institution.

Some endowment funds have guidelines stating how much of each year's investment income can be spent. For many universities, this amount is approximately 5% of the endowment's total asset value. Some institutions, such as Harvard, have endowments that are worth billions of dollars, so this 5% amount can end up equaling a large sum of money.
1
In the context of the U.S. higher educational system, the presence of endowment funds are often integral to the financial health of educational institutions.

Okay but that means that these institutions are hedge funds with an education side hustle.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I really don't see why subsidizing research needs to be done by the public.

All of the endpoints are for private industry.

A) Why do you get an education? So that you can get a job in private industry.

B) Why do we develop technology? So that private industry can make money developing it.

For point A, I can see the argument that we can make people that wouldn't otherwise have an opportunity to get the education and get the jobs, but in practice is doesn't play out like that. Private industry is so nepotistic. Very few of the people that get government aid end up in good jobs in industry. In cases there are jobs that the Good Ol' Boys for industry don't want to give their kids, they clearly prefer foreigners as indentured servants. So basically, we pay to train foreigners so that private industry can take advantage of indentured servants. The rest of us end up with giant academic bills.

Before World War 2, the principle language of science was German. After World War 2, it is English. Think about it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So, the University of California, *not* all of academia.

Stanford University, MIT, Northwestern University, Cornell University, University of Notre Dame, Emory University, University of Washington, and North Carolina State University are among other institutions that have announced either full or partial hiring freezes. You should expect more to follow suit.

Anyone who knows anything about academe knows that this has been going on since the pandemic when enrollment continued its trend of falling off the cliff. A college education has become too expensive and the cost benefit analysis is not always in the favor of throwing yourself into debt for 10 years.

The science community disagrees with you.

Currents cuts to research at eu precedented. The withholding of allocated USAID money/ NIH/ CDC and Dept Energy funding have caused many planned health and STEM research projects to be cancelled or paused.

DC is post doc at leading STEM academic research center and all the post docs are worried about finding work now.

Also enrollment has not been dropping off at top colleges but they are impacted by the research cuts as well.

Scientific Research is Getting Cut—and That Should Scare All Americans
The Trump administration’s cuts to federally funded STEM research is devastating current and future innovations by NEA Higher Ed members.
https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/scientific-research-getting-cut-and-should-scare-all-americans

US science is under threat ― now scientists are fighting back
Researchers are organizing protests and making their voices heard as Trump officials slash funding and lay off federal scientists.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00661-8


NIH Budget Cuts Are a “Short-Sighted” Setback for US Science
An NIH policy to reduce funding for indirect costs to 15 percent, although temporarily blocked nationwide, sparks widespread concern and criticism among scientists.
https://www.the-scientist.com/nih-budget-cuts-are-a-short-sighted-setback-for-us-science-72707

Space scientists fearful as Trump administration targets science and mulls NASA cuts
Researchers worry an “extinction-level event” is coming for space science as the Trump administration looks to slash spending.
https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/space-scientists-fearful-as-trump-administration-targets-science-and-mulls-nasa-cuts/

These frustrated scientists want to leave the United States — do you? Take Nature’s poll
In the wake of the Trump administration’s funding freezes and job cuts, some researchers are planning their next move.

Some scientists in the United States have told Nature that they are considering leaving the country in the wake of widespread disruption to research brought in by the administration of US President Donald Trump. The researchers say they are looking for opportunities in Europe, Australia and Asia.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00757-1

France has said they would welcome US scientists and researchers-this came after a French researcher was denied access into the country (he was coming to a conference in TX) because he texted with colleagues criticism of Trump policies. Everyone should be alarmed when reading this story.

The Netherlands has also started a fund to attract scientists and researchers fleeing the US. Republican funding cuts to science and research will invariably lead to a massive brain drain over the next four years. We are squandering so many advantages because of the morons in power. It's so easy to destroy things. But it takes decades to build all the infrastructure that goes into science and research. It's very clear that Republicans are pursuing the Russia model for the US. All the talent will end up in Canada and Europe to escape the enshittification of America.

PP to whom you responded - so very true.

My DC likely to become one of these scientists.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really don't see why subsidizing research needs to be done by the public.

All of the endpoints are for private industry.

A) Why do you get an education? So that you can get a job in private industry.

B) Why do we develop technology? So that private industry can make money developing it.

For point A, I can see the argument that we can make people that wouldn't otherwise have an opportunity to get the education and get the jobs, but in practice is doesn't play out like that. Private industry is so nepotistic. Very few of the people that get government aid end up in good jobs in industry. In cases there are jobs that the Good Ol' Boys for industry don't want to give their kids, they clearly prefer foreigners as indentured servants. So basically, we pay to train foreigners so that private industry can take advantage of indentured servants. The rest of us end up with giant academic bills.

This is *extremely* limited thinking and not well grounded in economics at all.

Ideas are inherently non rival (my use of an idea doesn't limit your use of an idea). But, just having a new idea isn't enough for a business to profit--they need to be able to somehow exclude other businesses from using (or fully taking advantage of) the new idea, or any potential profits will be competed away. And, if there's little chance to make a profit from an idea in the future, then the business won't do the research to develop the idea in the first place. It doesn't matter that the idea might be fantastic for society, since businesses only care about the gains that they themselves can capture.

We handle this problem, by, among other things, patent and copyright law. You get a temporary legal monopoly for a new idea to incentivize investment, and in exchange the idea is made public so the rest of the world can build upon it. But there is a big inherent tradeoff in this--monopolies are economically inefficient, and society would actually be better off if we could get the ideas without giving businesses these monopoly powers.

And, even those systems aren't enough to incentivize many kinds of research, because the research is not directed enough at a specific problem for businesses to assess how likely they are to profit, or because successfully generating the idea would undercut profits in other areas (like using existing compounds or naturally occurring substances in place of patented drugs). Or, sometimes, the immediate costs of allowing a monopoly for a couple decades are so big that we'd be better off just paying the research costs outright (e.g., HIV/AIDS medications).

Government and academic research exists to fill in these gaps. No one is suggesting that we shouldn't also have plenty of private research. But the idea that "all the endpoints are for private industry" or that private research alone could handle everything is absurd and frankly, dangerous.

Let's paraphrase. Businesses don't like what you are doing, people from modest backgrounds don't like what you are doing, the only people that get any benefit it seems are the dumb rich kids that paid to sit in class next to me and the foreigners that want green cards who sharpened my pencils so they could cheat off me. Academia has degenerated to a Visa mill.

BTW how many bad disingenuous arguments does academia get to make, like the one above about marginally qualified students doing well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So, the University of California, *not* all of academia.

Stanford University, MIT, Northwestern University, Cornell University, University of Notre Dame, Emory University, University of Washington, and North Carolina State University are among other institutions that have announced either full or partial hiring freezes. You should expect more to follow suit.

Anyone who knows anything about academe knows that this has been going on since the pandemic when enrollment continued its trend of falling off the cliff. A college education has become too expensive and the cost benefit analysis is not always in the favor of throwing yourself into debt for 10 years.

The "folk wisdom" on this is total bullshit. Even accounting for the huge differences between the average student who goes to college and one who does not, there is very good evidence from very good administrative data that going to college causes one's earnings to go up, even for the most marginal students.

See, e.g., https://www.nber.org/papers/w32296

Also notice in that paper that it's not just the individual rate of return to college students that is large. The "social" rate of return is large too. That's another way of saying that when people spread this folk wisdom to discourage people from going to college, they are making the world worse off, full stop.

Does that account that marginally admitted students are likely more well off to begin with. You know like the Varsity Blues sting where rich kids were cheating to get in. I was the opposite I was an exceptional student with a free ride(with fafsa), but very little return on the college degree. It took me nearly ten years to get a job in the field and am still making median wages for my area.

Higher education is nothing but a social sorting system.

Actually, yes, the study does deal with this pretty effectively, although the potential issue is kind of the opposite of what you're implying.

The study is using the various SAT/ACT cutoffs at public schools in Texas, only comparing people who are within a few test score points of the cutoff. These cutoffs have a big impact on admissions probability, but they are imperfect, because some students get in anyway (Figure 2). The students just above and below the cutoff look almost identical across all all the observable characteristics in the data (Figures 3 and 4), so there isn't an obvious bump that would exist if, for example, wealthier families were cheating on the SATs to get above the cutoff.

But, since the cutoffs aren't 100% binding, there is still a concern that wealthier families might be finding other ways to get in despite being below the SAT/ACT cutoffs. The standard econ toolkit in this case adjusts for this by statistically identifying "compliers", i.e. people who only go if they exceed the cutoff, because they don't find another way in. Comparing columns 4 and 5 of table 1, you can see that although the compliers are pretty similar to the other marginal applicants, there is some suggestive evidence that they may be a bit more economically disadvantaged. For example, compliers are more likely to be black and a bit less likely to be male.

But, the key thing is, the estimated effects of scoring above the threshold are for these compliers. In other words, this study measures the impact precisely on a subset of students that are not able to otherwise game the system, to use your words. More importantly, if the study is doing a bad job of this statistical adjustment (I don't think it is), then the estimated impact of going to college would likely be underestimated, not overestimated as you're suggesting. This is because SAT/ACT scores have a weaker relationship to eventual college attendance among wealthier people, so you'd be capturing some of the earnings effects of going to college in both sides of the cutoff

tl;dr yes the research is good. You have the link. Read the paper and quit with the folk wisdom bullshitting that is harming high school graduates by talking them out of one of the best investments they can make.

Your research just isn't consistent with other "high quality" research, showing nominal or negative benefit for kids from modest backgrounds going to inexpensive schools. I would attribute the effect to being that marginally qualified that end up going to college are more likely wealthy. I'm glad your statistics bear that out somewhat.

https://freopp.org/oppblog/do-low-income-students-benefit-from-college-what-the-data-say/

A little more than folk wisdom here.

First of all, to quote that same author in the report where they outline their ROI methodology, the best causal evidence is pretty clear: "In the academic literature, rigorous causal estimates of the financial return to college tend to lag the raw earnings gap between college graduates and high school graduates, though the causal return to college is still substantial. In other words, if college graduates had not gone to college, they would have still earned significantly more than the average high school graduate."

https://freopp.org/whitepapers/higher-educations-return-on-investment-methodology/

The same conclusion is borne out in Figure 2 of the report you cite--on average, almost all types of programs show a positive ROI.

That said, without going deeply into methods, Cooper has to do a lot of work and modeling to account for the fact that his most comprehensive data source only includes financial aid applicants, only includes graduates (not all attendees), and only includes average earnings for the first few years after graduation. There are a lot of assumptions baked into this modeling, all of which are negated by the use of administrative enrollment and earnings records in the Mountjoy paper. Even if one is comfortable with those assumptions on average, one should be cautious about how they affect interpretation at the margins.

More importantly, the existence of lower-return colleges that predominantly attract students from modest backgrounds underscores the original point. The Trump administration is, pointedly, not trying to dismantle such schools. They're going after elite institutions that they see as a potential check on their power. These are not the low return schools in Cooper's study. If cutting funding to top universities causes some of those students to attend lower-ROI institutions instead, that is unequivocally bad for students and for economic well-being. It's only good for the people consolidating power.

Finally, a huge portion (possibly the bulk) of the value of R-1 institutions isn't the education they provide to undergraduates. It's the value of the research they produce, much of which simply wouldn't happen if they didn't exist. None of these studies are trying to measure that impact, so they have nothing to say about what cutting down on research will do.

[Anonymous]

Big plus one - a great deal of medical, scientific, environmental, energy, epistemological, demographic and other important research will be lost.

It is tragic that so many people don’t u sweat and how much that research helps us in modern life at all levels - individual, state and national …

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So, the University of California, *not* all of academia.

Harvard, Princeton, Penn, University of Pittsburgh, University of Vermont …

All have sizeable endowments. Crack open that checkbook.

I love when people have no idea how higher eductaion works chime in.
Try learning something:https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/how-do-university-endowments-work/

Endowment funds support the teaching, research, and public service missions of colleges and universities.

Typically, endowment funds follow a fairly strict set of long-term guidelines that dictate the asset allocation that will yield the targeted return without taking on too much risk.

In the case of endowment funds for academic institutions, the income generated is intended to finance a portion of the operating or capital requirements of the institution.

Some endowment funds have guidelines stating how much of each year's investment income can be spent. For many universities, this amount is approximately 5% of the endowment's total asset value. Some institutions, such as Harvard, have endowments that are worth billions of dollars, so this 5% amount can end up equaling a large sum of money.
1
In the context of the U.S. higher educational system, the presence of endowment funds are often integral to the financial health of educational institutions.

Okay but that means that these institutions are hedge funds with an education side hustle.

Your statement reads like someone who heard something somewhere and just repeated it without an understanding of what you are saying.
They are not a hedge fund. You don't invest in a university and get your money back. Their endowments may and often are funneled to hedge funds instead of other money markets, but...
Oh never mind. You are not willing to understand so why waste my time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So, the University of California, *not* all of academia.

Stanford University, MIT, Northwestern University, Cornell University, University of Notre Dame, Emory University, University of Washington, and North Carolina State University are among other institutions that have announced either full or partial hiring freezes. You should expect more to follow suit.

Anyone who knows anything about academe knows that this has been going on since the pandemic when enrollment continued its trend of falling off the cliff. A college education has become too expensive and the cost benefit analysis is not always in the favor of throwing yourself into debt for 10 years.

The "folk wisdom" on this is total bullshit. Even accounting for the huge differences between the average student who goes to college and one who does not, there is very good evidence from very good administrative data that going to college causes one's earnings to go up, even for the most marginal students.

See, e.g., https://www.nber.org/papers/w32296

Also notice in that paper that it's not just the individual rate of return to college students that is large. The "social" rate of return is large too. That's another way of saying that when people spread this folk wisdom to discourage people from going to college, they are making the world worse off, full stop.

Does that account that marginally admitted students are likely more well off to begin with. You know like the Varsity Blues sting where rich kids were cheating to get in. I was the opposite I was an exceptional student with a free ride(with fafsa), but very little return on the college degree. It took me nearly ten years to get a job in the field and am still making median wages for my area.

Higher education is nothing but a social sorting system.

Actually, yes, the study does deal with this pretty effectively, although the potential issue is kind of the opposite of what you're implying.

The study is using the various SAT/ACT cutoffs at public schools in Texas, only comparing people who are within a few test score points of the cutoff. These cutoffs have a big impact on admissions probability, but they are imperfect, because some students get in anyway (Figure 2). The students just above and below the cutoff look almost identical across all all the observable characteristics in the data (Figures 3 and 4), so there isn't an obvious bump that would exist if, for example, wealthier families were cheating on the SATs to get above the cutoff.

But, since the cutoffs aren't 100% binding, there is still a concern that wealthier families might be finding other ways to get in despite being below the SAT/ACT cutoffs. The standard econ toolkit in this case adjusts for this by statistically identifying "compliers", i.e. people who only go if they exceed the cutoff, because they don't find another way in. Comparing columns 4 and 5 of table 1, you can see that although the compliers are pretty similar to the other marginal applicants, there is some suggestive evidence that they may be a bit more economically disadvantaged. For example, compliers are more likely to be black and a bit less likely to be male.

But, the key thing is, the estimated effects of scoring above the threshold are for these compliers. In other words, this study measures the impact precisely on a subset of students that are not able to otherwise game the system, to use your words. More importantly, if the study is doing a bad job of this statistical adjustment (I don't think it is), then the estimated impact of going to college would likely be underestimated, not overestimated as you're suggesting. This is because SAT/ACT scores have a weaker relationship to eventual college attendance among wealthier people, so you'd be capturing some of the earnings effects of going to college in both sides of the cutoff

tl;dr yes the research is good. You have the link. Read the paper and quit with the folk wisdom bullshitting that is harming high school graduates by talking them out of one of the best investments they can make.

Your research just isn't consistent with other "high quality" research, showing nominal or negative benefit for kids from modest backgrounds going to inexpensive schools. I would attribute the effect to being that marginally qualified that end up going to college are more likely wealthy. I'm glad your statistics bear that out somewhat.

https://freopp.org/oppblog/do-low-income-students-benefit-from-college-what-the-data-say/

A little more than folk wisdom here.

First of all, to quote that same author in the report where they outline their ROI methodology, the best causal evidence is pretty clear: "In the academic literature, rigorous causal estimates of the financial return to college tend to lag the raw earnings gap between college graduates and high school graduates, though the causal return to college is still substantial. In other words, if college graduates had not gone to college, they would have still earned significantly more than the average high school graduate."

https://freopp.org/whitepapers/higher-educations-return-on-investment-methodology/

The same conclusion is borne out in Figure 2 of the report you cite--on average, almost all types of programs show a positive ROI.

That said, without going deeply into methods, Cooper has to do a lot of work and modeling to account for the fact that his most comprehensive data source only includes financial aid applicants, only includes graduates (not all attendees), and only includes average earnings for the first few years after graduation. There are a lot of assumptions baked into this modeling, all of which are negated by the use of administrative enrollment and earnings records in the Mountjoy paper. Even if one is comfortable with those assumptions on average, one should be cautious about how they affect interpretation at the margins.

More importantly, the existence of lower-return colleges that predominantly attract students from modest backgrounds underscores the original point. The Trump administration is, pointedly, not trying to dismantle such schools. They're going after elite institutions that they see as a potential check on their power. These are not the low return schools in Cooper's study. If cutting funding to top universities causes some of those students to attend lower-ROI institutions instead, that is unequivocally bad for students and for economic well-being. It's only good for the people consolidating power.

Finally, a huge portion (possibly the bulk) of the value of R-1 institutions isn't the education they provide to undergraduates. It's the value of the research they produce, much of which simply wouldn't happen if they didn't exist. None of these studies are trying to measure that impact, so they have nothing to say about what cutting down on research will do.

DP
Big plus one - a great deal of medical, scientific, environmental, energy, epistemological, demographic and other important research will be lost.

It is tragic that so many people don’t understand how much that research helps us in modern life at all levels - individual, state and national … it is a colossal loss for the US.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really don't see why subsidizing research needs to be done by the public.

All of the endpoints are for private industry.

A) Why do you get an education? So that you can get a job in private industry.

B) Why do we develop technology? So that private industry can make money developing it.

For point A, I can see the argument that we can make people that wouldn't otherwise have an opportunity to get the education and get the jobs, but in practice is doesn't play out like that. Private industry is so nepotistic. Very few of the people that get government aid end up in good jobs in industry. In cases there are jobs that the Good Ol' Boys for industry don't want to give their kids, they clearly prefer foreigners as indentured servants. So basically, we pay to train foreigners so that private industry can take advantage of indentured servants. The rest of us end up with giant academic bills.

This is *extremely* limited thinking and not well grounded in economics at all.

Ideas are inherently non rival (my use of an idea doesn't limit your use of an idea). But, just having a new idea isn't enough for a business to profit--they need to be able to somehow exclude other businesses from using (or fully taking advantage of) the new idea, or any potential profits will be competed away. And, if there's little chance to make a profit from an idea in the future, then the business won't do the research to develop the idea in the first place. It doesn't matter that the idea might be fantastic for society, since businesses only care about the gains that they themselves can capture.

We handle this problem, by, among other things, patent and copyright law. You get a temporary legal monopoly for a new idea to incentivize investment, and in exchange the idea is made public so the rest of the world can build upon it. But there is a big inherent tradeoff in this--monopolies are economically inefficient, and society would actually be better off if we could get the ideas without giving businesses these monopoly powers.

And, even those systems aren't enough to incentivize many kinds of research, because the research is not directed enough at a specific problem for businesses to assess how likely they are to profit, or because successfully generating the idea would undercut profits in other areas (like using existing compounds or naturally occurring substances in place of patented drugs). Or, sometimes, the immediate costs of allowing a monopoly for a couple decades are so big that we'd be better off just paying the research costs outright (e.g., HIV/AIDS medications).

Government and academic research exists to fill in these gaps. No one is suggesting that we shouldn't also have plenty of private research. But the idea that "all the endpoints are for private industry" or that private research alone could handle everything is absurd and frankly, dangerous.

Let's paraphrase. Businesses don't like what you are doing, people from modest backgrounds don't like what you are doing, the only people that get any benefit it seems are the dumb rich kids that paid to sit in class next to me and the foreigners that want green cards who sharpened my pencils so they could cheat off me. Academia has degenerated to a Visa mill.

BTW how many bad disingenuous arguments does academia get to make, like the one above about marginally qualified students doing well.

You realize that Musk never invented Tesla, Space X or other technologies his companies rely on? He built his fortune on federal grants and research by others.

He is far from alone.

Private companies benefit from public research and federal government funding through direct funding for research and development, access to publicly generated knowledge, and the creation of a supportive policy environment that fosters innovation.

1. Direct Funding and Collaboration:
The federal government offers grants and contracts to private companies for research and development projects, particularly in areas of national interest or where private sector investment might be insufficient.

2. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR):
These programs specifically target small businesses, providing funding for innovative research and development projects.

3. Public-Private Partnerships:
The government can collaborate with private companies on research projects, sharing resources and expertise to achieve common goals.

4. Procurement:
Federal agencies may purchase goods and services from private companies that are based on or utilize publicly funded research, creating demand for these innovations.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is outrageous. The purpose of academia is the steady expansion of hiring, funded by an increasing debt burden on younger generations. For Ttump to even slow this process is monstrous.

Yup, 70% of the tuition revenue goes to administrative costs such as yet another assistant dean of Frisbee or assistant dean of you name it and DEI programs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really don't see why subsidizing research needs to be done by the public.

All of the endpoints are for private industry.

A) Why do you get an education? So that you can get a job in private industry.

B) Why do we develop technology? So that private industry can make money developing it.

For point A, I can see the argument that we can make people that wouldn't otherwise have an opportunity to get the education and get the jobs, but in practice is doesn't play out like that. Private industry is so nepotistic. Very few of the people that get government aid end up in good jobs in industry. In cases there are jobs that the Good Ol' Boys for industry don't want to give their kids, they clearly prefer foreigners as indentured servants. So basically, we pay to train foreigners so that private industry can take advantage of indentured servants. The rest of us end up with giant academic bills.

This is *extremely* limited thinking and not well grounded in economics at all.

Ideas are inherently non rival (my use of an idea doesn't limit your use of an idea). But, just having a new idea isn't enough for a business to profit--they need to be able to somehow exclude other businesses from using (or fully taking advantage of) the new idea, or any potential profits will be competed away. And, if there's little chance to make a profit from an idea in the future, then the business won't do the research to develop the idea in the first place. It doesn't matter that the idea might be fantastic for society, since businesses only care about the gains that they themselves can capture.

We handle this problem, by, among other things, patent and copyright law. You get a temporary legal monopoly for a new idea to incentivize investment, and in exchange the idea is made public so the rest of the world can build upon it. But there is a big inherent tradeoff in this--monopolies are economically inefficient, and society would actually be better off if we could get the ideas without giving businesses these monopoly powers.

And, even those systems aren't enough to incentivize many kinds of research, because the research is not directed enough at a specific problem for businesses to assess how likely they are to profit, or because successfully generating the idea would undercut profits in other areas (like using existing compounds or naturally occurring substances in place of patented drugs). Or, sometimes, the immediate costs of allowing a monopoly for a couple decades are so big that we'd be better off just paying the research costs outright (e.g., HIV/AIDS medications).

Government and academic research exists to fill in these gaps. No one is suggesting that we shouldn't also have plenty of private research. But the idea that "all the endpoints are for private industry" or that private research alone could handle everything is absurd and frankly, dangerous.

Let's paraphrase. Businesses don't like what you are doing, people from modest backgrounds don't like what you are doing, the only people that get any benefit it seems are the dumb rich kids that paid to sit in class next to me and the foreigners that want green cards who sharpened my pencils so they could cheat off me. Academia has degenerated to a Visa mill.

BTW how many bad disingenuous arguments does academia get to make, like the one above about marginally qualified students doing well.

Absolutely. Taxpayers foot the bill for most of the basic R&D costs to develop a medication and then the pharmaceutical companies take them and spend a small fraction of the amount of tax money that were spent and those companies develop drugs and charge American taxpayers who paid for most of the development costs 4 to 7 tines what these companies charge people in other countries who never paid a cent. Disgusting that taxpayers who paid taxes for decades have to starve to psy for these exorbitantly priced drugs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is outrageous. The purpose of academia is the steady expansion of hiring, funded by an increasing debt burden on younger generations. For Ttump to even slow this process is monstrous.

Yup, 70% of the tuition revenue goes to administrative costs such as yet another assistant dean of Frisbee or assistant dean of you name it and DEI programs.

So your brilliant idea is drive our best and brightest to boost their research/ innovations/ talents?